Addressing the Epidemic of Epidemics: Germs, Security, and a Call for Biocriticism (Review Essay)

Quarterly Journal of Speech Vol. 97, No. 2, May 2011, pp. 224244 BOOK REVIEWS Cara A. Finnegan, Editor Review Essay Addressing the Epidemic of Epidemics: Germs, Security, and a Call for Biocriticism Lisa Keränen Philip Alcabes, Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 336 pp. $16.95 (paper). Lynn C. Klotz and Edward J. Sylvester, Breeding Bio Insecurity: How US Biodefense Is Exporting Fear, Globalizing Risk, and Making Us All Less Secure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 272 pp. $27.50 (cloth). Andrew Lakoff and Stephen J. Collier, eds., Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 312 pp. $29.50 (cloth). Andrew T. Price-Smith, Contagion and Chaos: Disease, Ecology, and National Security in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), ix
281 pp. $25.00 (paper). Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), xi
373 pp. $24.95 (paper). As anthrax-laced letters stoked the anger and anxiety that followed 9/11, the San Diego UnionTribune seized the zeitgeist with an editorial cartoon parodying Grant Wood’s iconic 1930 American Gothic.1 Like its namesake, Anthrax Gothic depicted Pa Farmer and his spinster daughter standing before a gabled house reminiscent of a barn. But instead of displaying their grim Puritan resolve in overalls and a colonial print apron, Anthrax Gothic’s farmers donned biohazard suits over gasmasks; Pa Farmer’s black rubber-gloved hand clutched his pronged Lisa Keränen is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Communication and Associate of the Program for Arts and Humanities in Health Care at the University of Colorado Denver. She thanks Cara Finnegan, John Lyne, Jeffrey Bennett, Stephen John Hartnett, and Hamilton Bean for intellectual engagement with this essay. Correspondence to: Lisa Keränen, Campus Box 176, University of Colorado Denver, Denver CO, 80217-33644, USA. Email: lisa.keranen@ucdenver.edu ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2011 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2011.565785 Review Essay 225 Figure 1. Anthrax Gothic, 2001. This editorial cartoon by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Steve Breen, # San Diego Union-Tribune, is used by permission of the artist. pitchfork (Figure 1). Anthrax Gothic furnishes an evocative image to begin a review essay about germs, rhetoric, and security. This image registers both an abiding concern for contamination, national identity, and Otherness and calls into question whether, as one biosecurity expert famously opined, ‘‘the age of bioterrorism is now.’’2 The competing threads of historical continuity and contingency represented in Anthrax Gothic, and the interlacing of domestic space and national security, characterize an ambivalent and evolving relationship to germs. While concerns about contagion and national security are hardly new, the period following the 2001 anthrax mailings prompted an unprecedented escalation of biodefense initiatives meant to counter natural and manufactured microbial threats.3 Beyond the realm of biodefense, citizens of the twenty-first century increasingly encounter a potent and politically salient set of microbial discourses, materials, and practices, ranging from biothrillers and ‘‘viral’’ videos to incessant news reports of possible pandemic, an arsenal of genetically engineered micro-organisms, and a reconfigured public health infrastructure that subsumes infectious disease under the moniker of ‘‘public health security.’’ Despite the growing prominence of infective matters, however, scholars in communication and rhetoric have yet to contribute to the understanding of germ discourses with the same level of engagement as their colleagues in English, history, political science, and security studies.4 Yet rhetorical critics are well positioned to provide much-needed inquiry into the persuasive power of pathogens. In this essay, I call for communication and rhetoric scholars to take up the symbolic and material realities of germs, to intensify a nascent strand of scholarship I call biocriticism. By biocriticism, I mean a sustained and rigorous analysis of the artifacts, texts, discursive formations, visual representations, and material practices positioned at the nexus of disease and culture. In the following pages, I write specifically about the prospects for a biocriticism of biological ‘‘security risks,’’ although I speculate about a broader vision of biocriticism in the essay’s conclusion. Inquiry into what Melinda Cooper calls the ‘‘biological turn’’ in the War on Terror will allow rhetoricians better to understand how germ rhetoric entangles anxieties about globalization, identity, and contamination into historically specific narratives that encode, revise, and challenge prevailing moral, aesthetic, epistemological, and political 226 L. Keränen commitments.5 Such a project may also help us better chart how those discourses interact with particular lines of policy and action that engage microbial life. Moreover, biocriticism potentially would offer an important complement to nuclear criticism, contribute to Cold War (and pre- and post-Cold War, post-9/11) rhetorical history, augment studies of biopower and biopolitics, strengthen existing veins of scholarship in the rhetoric of science and medicine, and provide opportunities for scholars of both public address and public spheres to consider how pathogens and other biological material are cultivated, transformed, and shepherded into action.6 As a mode of inquiry that analyzes the rhetorics of contagion across time and place, biocriticism would potentially unite disparate subfields of communication studies around the pressing problems of biological ‘‘security’’ and, to borrow a Foucault-inspired phrase from Nikolas Rose, ‘‘the politics of life itself.’’7 Biocriticism is a requisite response to our present epidemic of epidemics.8 Obesity, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, HIV/AIDS, sudden acute respiratory syndrome, and influenza are but a few contemporary examples that bear the label of epi-demos, a word used by the Hippocratics to mean that ‘‘which circulates or propagates in a country.’’9 The ‘‘epidemic of signification’’ surrounding viruses and other pathogens means that our popular and visual imaginary*including the films 28 Days Later, I am Legend, The Dead Outside, The Last Man, Doomsday, 28 Weeks Later, Invasion, and Ultraviolet, to list but a few*increasingly features bleeding ghouls, humans-turned-infectious-zombies seeking to transform innocent citizens into menacing alien life forms.10 Many of these cinematic representations involve a biological weapons laboratory gone awry, thus cuing audiences to real-world exigencies.11 The anxiety underlying the burgeoning fascination with contagion is impelled in part by the specter of bioterrorism and in part by concerns about viral pandemic and novel infectious diseases. The official response to such anxieties has unleashed a multiplication of germ agents, as scientists create new biological weapons in the name of protecting us from them. Thus, the seemingly disparate fields of emerging infectious disease, bioterrorism, food safety, and genetic engineering comprise divergent but mutually reinforcing nodes in the same biodefense initiative. At a time when public health triumphs in the developed world have largely stamped out the lethal infections of the last century, we are witnessing nothing short of a ‘‘return of the microbe,’’ a development that prompts the questions: how did we get here, and where are we headed?12 In what follows, I review five recent works concerning pathogens, biology, and security. By placing them in dialogue with existing research in our field and allied disciplines, I sketch out an initial roadmap for considering emerging configurations of disease and security in a critical practice we may call biocriticism. I begin by establishing the deep background of twentieth century biological weapons developments in order to imply a set of texts and contexts*largely ignored by our discipline*that gave rise to our present predicament. Then I consider how each of the five volumes under review suggests further lines of research for rhetoric and communication scholars. I conclude by arguing for the promise of a biocriticism concentrated on articulations of germs and security, narratives of risk and imagined futures, and biological citizenship. Ultimately, I chart a preliminary path for rhetoricians to address how present configurations of pathogens represent new and vexing understandings of bios and polis, self and other, risk and safety, and domestic and international security. A Brief History of Biodefense In the waning days of World War II, Japan’s germ weaponeers*freshly blanketed with immunity from war-crimes prosecution in exchange for information about their live human Review Essay 227 experiments*provided key insights to officials working at what would become the epicenter of the US biological weapons program: Camp Detrick, Maryland.13 While the shifting fate of germs in the twentieth century is deeply textured, the move to large-scale domestication and refinement of naturally occurring microbes into weapons can be placed into relief by examining what happened at Camp Detrick. Operating under the banner of the Army Chemical War Service, the architects of the US biological weapons program, at what is now Fort Detrick, included pharmaceutical magnate George W. Merck and bacteriologists Ira L. Baldwin and Theodor Rosebury, who pondered the possibilities of enhancing naturally occurring pathogens for use in warfare.14 Here, the seeds for viral apocalypse were sown institutionally, as scientists grappled with the life-ending implications of biological warfare as they developed, tested, and refined what were then called bacteriological weapons, or ‘‘bugs.’’15 As the Cold War expanded, bacteriological weaponry grew into a complex but closely guarded business. For a time, its rhetoric went mostly underground, but can be traced through declassified documents, published technical reports, civil defense films, and the occasional appearance of newspaper articles speculating about its operations.16 During World War I, a series of sporadic attempts by individual agents to infect livestock or crops mutated by the end of World War II into a largescale international effort to produce offensive and defensive biological weapons applications. Although nuclear imagery overshadowed biological weapons after 1945, biological weapons remained a muted but deadly project continuously reworked throughout the Cold War.17 When President Nixon declared a US prohibition on the use of biological weapons in warfare in 1969, an era of heightened secrecy reigned, even as a spate of viral thriller movies such as the 1971 versions of the Andromeda Strain and Omega Man captivated citizens’ imaginations. Although more than a hundred nations signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) in the decades that followed Nixon’s prohibition, the science of biological weapons continued clandestinely, with the US and the Soviets trying to out-produce one another. For example, in 1992 Soviet defector and germ weaponeer Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov (now called Ken Alibek) offered chilling testimony that Soviet advancements exceeded US capabilities. News of a genetically engineered Soviet super-weapon, which spliced together the most fearsome capacities of several pathogens, gripped US policymakers; preparation for viral attacks intensified once again.18 By the time Bill Clinton stayed up all night reading Richard Preston’s fictional bestseller The Cobra Event, premised on a bioterrorism attack in a metropolitan subway, the germ threat was becoming thoroughly lodged in the American imaginary. It represented a kind of ‘‘viral chic,’’ inscribing arguably primeval and recurring contagion anxieties with late twentieth century geopolitical stylings.19 Biological weapons rhetoric of the 1990s, a time when the world was ‘‘infected with virus metaphors,’’ thus shifted from concerns about state weapons projects to the use of such weapons by sub- or non-state actors, terrorists, and criminals.20 The 1990s hit television show The X-Files, for instance, advanced an ongoing germ storyline featuring an alien black oil virus and the shadowy syndicate who trafficked in it. The series abounded with Cold War mythological themes, substate plots, and conspiracy theories geared around black oil*viral chic indeed! The anthrax mailings that followed 9/11 would only amplify the cultural interest in viral matters that had bloomed following the AIDS epidemic and blossomed during the Clinton years; they also enlarged the economic and political stakes for studies of biodefense in general. In fact, in the months after 9/11, US ‘‘official documents declared that infectious disease outbreak and bioterrorism should be treated as identical threats, in the absence of any sure means of distinguishing the two.’’21 As Melinda Cooper explains, ‘‘for US defense, it seems, the frontier between warfare and public health, microbial life and bioterrorism, had become 228 L. Keränen strategically indifferent.’’22 The US launched a suite of initiatives with eerily vague sciencefiction-sounding names like Projects BioSense, BioShield, and BioWatch, to monitor and prepare for unusual outbreaks. The US also began to propel billions of dollars into biodefense at a time when the former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist hyperbolically called bioterrorism ‘‘the greatest existential threat we have in the world today.’’23 The resurgence of germ anxieties in the days following the post-9/11 anthrax letters thus registers across public and political, technical and scientific, and entertainment and mass media contexts. Given the rising interest in germs manufactured and naturally occurring, it is of little surprise that a spate of books since 9/11 (and a number before) address the cultural, material, and political dimensions of biological weapons and naturally occurring pandemics. While many of their themes overlap, the five recent books I review in this essay span two broad foci: germs, narrative, and identity; and germs, governance, and security. Germs, Narrative, and Identity The role of pathogens in prompting cultural narratives of self and other, stranger and enemy, morality and immorality, risk and safety, and cleanliness and contamination motivates the books by English professor Priscilla Wald and epidemiologist Philip Alcabes. Wald’s masterful Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative investigates the communicative aspects of contagion by focusing on the cultural work of the outbreak narrative across the arc of modern history. Wald begins in the near present with the 2003 outbreak of sudden acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which gripped epidemiologists and global citizens alike. Using global SARS reportage as an extended example, Wald argues that outbreaks transcend epidemiological reality; they constitute narratives with deep social and political consequences. She therefore sets out to ‘‘understand the appeal and persistence of the outbreak narrative and to consider how it shapes accounts of disease emergence across genres and media’’ (3). In doing so, she examines the interaction of medicine and myth by chronicling how outbreak narratives constitute communities. Her central argument: the communicability of disease, like the communicability of ideas, bears the imprint of social relations. Cutting across a wide swath of fictionalized outbreak narratives ranging from Richard Preston’s ‘‘terrifying true tale’’ and international bestseller The Hot Zone to Patrick Lynch’s film Carriers, Wald begins her chapter ‘‘Imagined Immunities’’ by showing ‘‘how the outbreak narrative articulates community on a national scale, as it identifies the health and well-being of those legally within the borders of the state with its worthy representatives’’ (33). Borrowing from Benedict Anderson’s well-rehearsed notion of imagined community, she probes how outbreak narratives register the anxieties of belonging and Otherness. Contagion, she reminds us, literally means ‘‘to touch together’’ (12). Wald finds that prominent twentieth century outbreak narratives across novels, cinema, and popular accounts obscure Cold War legacies of colonialism and decolonization, presenting contagion as ‘‘a cause rather than an expression of social formations throughout history’’ (47). Wald’s close attention to the language used to talk about outbreaks tracks the implications of terms such as ‘‘index case,’’ ‘‘superspreaders,’’ ‘‘the carrier,’’ and ‘‘patient zero.’’ A chapter entitled ‘‘Healthy Carrier’’ features another loaded term, one that evokes danger and dread. Here, Wald turns to that archetypal figure of contagious suspicion, ‘‘Typhoid Mary,’’ as she traces both scientific and popular accounts of the refiguring of working class Irish immigrant Mary Mallon into a public health threat. Public health caseworker Dr. George A. Soper’s and others’ evolving construction of Mallon as a threat imbricates debates about gender, Review Essay 229 sexuality, social class, and moral responsibility. Stories of Mallon, however, did more than cast foreign domestic laborers as objects of suspicion; they justified the burgeoning field of epidemiology by transforming the language of bacteriology into a rationale for involuntary confinement. Next, Wald identifies fascinating linkages between urban sociology and bacteriology in the work of sociologist Robert E. Park and his colleagues at the University of Chicago and elsewhere. The notion of ‘‘social contagion’’ was integral to the Chicago School’s ‘‘science of society,’’ revealing a commingling of scientific and social theories into a vision of collective identity based on the notion that ‘‘ideas and attitudes spread like germs because of individual proximity and interdependence’’ (137). Studies of crowds, tenements, and immigrant populations evinced concern with infection and borrowed heavily from the language of bacteriology. The idea of ‘‘communicable Americanism’’ signaled what sociologists considered a productive form of social contagion wherein ‘‘the tenements provided the arena where . . . literally and figuratively diseased outsiders became productive bearers of American culture’’ (142). Important, too, was the notion of cultural ‘‘invasion,’’ which Park appropriated from the fields of botany and zoology as he and others worked out an ecological model of the city inflected with biological characteristics. The detailed accounting of the multiple streams of influence as politics, science, and technology co-evolve, and therefore mutually shape one another, marks Wald’s impressive scope and meticulous research. In ‘‘Viral Cultures,’’ Wald tracks the notion of ‘‘invasion’’ in Cold War discourse and explores how 1950s virology increasingly figured into media accounts of communism. She explains, ‘‘as viruses became increasingly sinister and wily, sneaking into cells and assuming control of their mechanisms, external agents, such as Communists, became viral, threatening to corrupt the dissemination of information as they infiltrated the nerve center of the state’’ (159). Jack Finney’s 1955 bestselling novel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, like many popular epidemiological horror stories of its time, ‘‘reveal[s] a deep concern with the possible loss of humanity conceived as the theft of mind and body, a horrifying metamorphosis that is at once apocalyptic and ecstatic’’ (161). By comparing the book and its two film adaptations, Wald traces shifting contagion anxieties across the Cold War. This chapter also includes a tantalizing four-page passage on germ warfare, wherein Wald chronicles the incorporation of military metaphors into the language of virology. She also demonstrates how, in the space age, representations of the virus as ‘‘communication gone awry’’ (186) functioned in the work of William S. Burroughs and Cold War science fiction with its creepy ‘‘pod people.’’ Moving closer to the present, stories of Gaëtan Dugas, ‘‘The Columbus of AIDS,’’ animate chapter five. Wald follows the rhetorical construction of Dugas as ‘‘Patient Zero’’ in Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On and other sources, revealing the integration and divergences from earlier outbreak narratives. Stories of Dugas and AIDS are ‘‘endowed . . . with the sinister agency of human retribution’’ in which HIV becomes a ‘‘willful scourge’’ (215). Like Mallon, Dugas appears at the epicenter of debates about responsibility and the curtailment of individual rights in order to protect the social body. However, the constructed story of this promiscuous flight attendant ‘‘marks a shift in the attribution of blame and a deflection from the structural analysis of the epidemic’’ (254). Accounts of HIV were further haunted by Third World colonialism as they tracked the African origin thesis, presenting the continent as a dark and dangerous threat to the First World. Popular films such as Outbreak and The Blood Artists, for example, trafficked in the anxieties of lethal viruses, reinforced colonial fantasies, and ultimately conferred authority on medical science. Wald concludes by asking readers to be wary of germ stories and the power differences they mask: 230 L. Keränen Amid the uncertainties about the forecasted pandemic, there is no doubt that it, or any pandemic, will affect the world’s populations inequitably. The emerging stories can exacerbate or begin to address the inequities. They can make a difference. It is not only possible but time to change the stories and the world they imagine. (270) Wald’s call to recraft our germ narratives constitutes a utopian task more easily suggested than accomplished. Yet on the whole, Wald’s chapters testify to a rich and evolving outbreak narrative that performs consequential cultural work. Her dense, exquisitely detailed research presents rhetoricians with a critical model of how to conduct careful readings of texts that place them in conversation with wider socio-political events. Such work enables the germ critic to uncover the traffic between virology and many other domains of public and technical life and to expose the cultural work of contagion. By contrast, Philip Alcabes’ Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu offers a wide-ranging, philosophical, and, because he covers so much ground, somewhat cursory treatment of epidemic narratives. With its Publisher’s Weekly starred review, this book received high praise and attention from the popular press. Yet the book’s central argument*that fear of the unknown fuels fantasies about epidemics often out of proportion with their effects*feels at once flatter and grander against the richness and specificity of Wald’s cases. Nevertheless, Alcabes sets off to analyze three aspects of each epidemic he pursues: the physical event of the microbial presence in the ecosystem, the social crisis prompted by this destabilization, and the narratives that help humans account for the change. Echoing Wald, he writes that an epidemic ‘‘is a story that has different morals for different ‘readers’: it teaches various lessons, follows differing accounts (depending on who is telling us what is happening), and can be a sounding of the alarm or a lament or an admonition’’ (6). After noting the contemporary practice of labeling everything from obesity to tuberculosis an ‘‘epidemic,’’ Alcabes traces the etymology of the Greek term, which shares a root with demos, from Homer’s polemos epidemios, through the Hippocratic work On Airs, Waters, and Places. Pestilence for Homer, for instance, comprised the will of the gods. Alcabes then fleetingly charts changing conceptions of epidemic with reference to brief passages from Thucydides, Virgil, early Hebrew thinking and Levitical law through the seventeenth century, when physical illness became separated from mental or spiritual malady. In a chapter entitled ‘‘Plague: The Birth of the Model Epidemic,’’ Alcabes sets his sights on a scourge that epidemiologists believe killed over one quarter of Europe’s population between 1347 and 1351, leaving a lasting impression on our cultural memory. Today, we know the Middle Age’s yersinia pestis epidemic as ‘‘the Black Death,’’ a term we learn was coined only in the 1800s. For Alcabes, the plague characterizes the ‘‘archetypal epidemic,’’ a ‘‘cataclysm on which people piled meanings: treachery, foreignness, sanctity and faithlessness, dying for one’s religion, obeying (or rebelling against) authority, and, of course, the fecklessness of nature’’ (22). The plague also inflamed old prejudices against the Jews, for instance, even though the Church advised against the scapegoating and violence perpetrated against them; thousands were burned in a horrifying effort to stop the plague. In his chapter ‘‘Cholera, Poverty, and the Politicized Epidemic,’’ Alcabes follows cholera out of the Indian subcontinent in the late 1700s through Europe in the 1800s, demonstrating how cholera became narrativized and understood as a ‘‘disease of the poor,’’ rendering poverty an object of fear among the upper classes. ‘‘Germs, Science, and the Stranger’’ considers how epidemics disrupt social order by casting strangers as objects of suspicion. SARS, ‘‘the first epidemic of the twenty-first century,’’ tapped into concerns about the dangers of contagion during commercial flight, reminiscent of Wald’s analysis of Gaëtan Dugas (88). Media discussions of five ‘‘superspreaders’’ in Singapore Review Essay 231 exacerbated the sense that stranger-wariness and quarantines in Asia began to resemble medieval scenes. ‘‘The triumph of germ theory explains both why we can control diseases like SARS and why we are terrified of them,’’ Alcabes writes, without fully explaining this process (88). Yet, ‘‘the simple causal story in which germs had been allowed to infiltrate society because a few individuals behaved ineptly or inconsiderately remains compelling,’’ he observes, again emphasizing the connections between outbreaks and negative moral attributions (89). Alcabes investigates the stories surrounding a varied group of diseases. ‘‘Conquest of Contagion’’ examines how the epidemic story changes as germs are tamed by public health triumphs, such as the eradication of venereal disease, while ‘‘Postmodern Epidemics’’ declares that the Toxic Shock scare of the 1970s was a ‘‘media-driven health crisis’’ and maintains the Legionnaires’ Disease outbreak ‘‘revealed a shift in American fears and a concomitant change in how people weighed risks’’ (144, 146). Alcabes here notes a swing toward thinking that an infectious threat might lurk behind ‘‘the healthy exterior’’ (147). This shift, he maintains, anticipated the response to AIDS that ‘‘has made risk central to our view of ourselves, giving voice to a deep anxiety about whether the modern world, which seems to have broken with the past, harbors unprecedented dangers’’ (178). ‘‘Managing the Imagined Epidemic’’ addresses what Alcabes terms ‘‘the bioterrorism scare,’’ the ‘‘obesity scare’’ and, provocatively, autism, which he casts as ‘‘the postmodern epidemic of nothing’’ (205). Bioterrorism is a crisis like the others because ‘‘the powerful deem it to be such’’ (212). Obesity, he argues, lets society manage a fear of death by projecting it onto fat people, who are transformed into objects of dread. Autism, he maintains, is not in fact increasing but is being diagnosed (and talked about) more frequently, a trend Alcabes links to motives of profit and social control. Here, Alcabes’ pronouncements offer an interesting starting place for rhetoricians who might offer detailed accounts of how the rhetorics of non-infectious epidemics such as obesity, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and autism function and with what effects.24 Alcabes reaches similar conclusions about the narrative work of epidemics as Wald. His epilogue observes: ‘‘Yet even in the case of epidemics of real disease, media commentators and the many officials who pander to them together craft the now-customary epidemic story. It is a tale of lurking dangers and hidden risks . . .’’ (216). Dread is an easy, interesting read that contains many pithy aphorisms but it may frustrate readers looking for extended textual analyses and concrete examples. The book is also vexingly unclear about how dread and the fear of death precisely operate in the context of real and imagined infection. Whether one prefers Wald’s densely laden textual accounts or Alcabes’ breezy summaries, both authors make the convincing case that the stories we tell about epidemic, contagion, and carriers constitute identity in consequential ways that often perpetuate negative stereotypes about the most vulnerable members of society. Germs, Security, and Governance The remaining three books configure germs in relation to governance, offering radically divergent assessments of the present biosecurity situation, its relation to geopolitics, and the role of rhetoric in shaping understandings of contagious threats. Price-Smith, operating from a realist paradigm, wants to subsume health under the rubric of security, because infection or even fears about potential outbreak can hamper governance. Also operating from a realist, though somewhat more insistent position, Klotz and Sylvester express concern for the risks entailed in bloated biodefense initiatives and the hyperbolic rhetoric that floats the industry. 232 L. Keränen Finally, and in my view most convincingly, the essays in Collier and Lakoff ’s volume reveal the dilemmas posed by expanded notions of biosecurity. Political scientist Andrew T. Price-Smith’s Contagion and Chaos: Disease, Ecology, and National Security in the Era of Globalization begins with the presumption that ‘‘health is the fulcrum of material power’’ in order to probe the links between health and sovereign states (1). In this view, epidemics represent threats to state security. Consequently, Price-Smith advances five interrelated hypotheses about disease and national security. First, he argues that disease may ‘‘compromise the prosperity, the legitimacy, the structural cohesion, and in certain cases the security of sovereign states’’ (3). Second, he maintains that epidemics of novel pathogens may encourage political and economic strife between sovereign powers. Third, he posits that the criteria of lethality, transmissibility, fear, and economic damage can help determine which pathogens threaten national security. Fourth, he positions warfare and conflict as ‘‘disease amplifiers.’’ Finally, he grounds the concept of ‘‘health security’’ within strands of realist republican theory. The book is ‘‘admittedly an eclectic synthesis’’ that uses four case studies concerning possible pathways of biological agents in systems in order to explore his hypotheses (4). The first case is a historical one extrapolated from the First World War to the age of ‘Swine’ Flu. The Great Pandemic of 1918 starred an H1N1 variant that struck down healthy adults, especially soldiers, in the final year of the Great War. For Price-Smith, this pandemic shows how the influenza virus not only resulted in ‘‘widespread death and debilitation’’ but also prompted a paralysis of governance, which ‘‘ultimately contributed to the collapse of the [Austrian] empire’’ (78). Price-Smith’s concern is that a contemporary novel virus could similarly overwhelm hospitals, strain foreign relations, and constitute a direct threat to the material security of nation states. The second case addresses the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Zimbabwe. On a global scale, AIDS killed 2.8 million and newly infected 4.1 million in 2005 alone (89). In Zimbabwe, over 1.7 million people have HIV; life expectancy has dropped to 37, and the nation faces a staggering infant mortality rate of 79 percent (97). Poor governance and the deaths of a large portion of the adult population have threatened regional stability and severely compromised the nation’s economic and political base, especially when contrasted with neighboring Botswana. This case suggests that HIV/AIDS affects governance by generating large numbers of orphans who may turn to crime or radical ideology, exacerbating class inequities, forcing competition over scarce resources, encouraging the persecution of minorities, and diminishing economic and institutional productivity. The third case of CreutzfeldtJakob disease (CJD), the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) colloquially known as ‘‘Mad Cow Disease,’’ provides a contrasting case study where ‘‘inaccuracies in the perception’’ coupled with ‘‘high levels of uncertainty’’ inflated public fears fueling economic and political harms to wealthy Great Britain (118). Although the human toll of CJD in Great Britain was quite low, fear about the unknown disease led to an erosion of trust in political and health governance, prompting broader bans of British beef, and stoking lingering mistrust of expert opinion. Moreover, this case study demonstrates how the mass media catalyzed BSE hysteria, and framed BSE as a case of ‘‘modern ‘progress’ gone horribly awry’’ (137). Here, BSE reportage revealed cultural anxieties about Mother Nature unleashing havoc on humanity for violating the natural order. Feeding grass-eating ruminants infected animal matter represented a perversion of nature; Mother Nature fought back by unleashing CJD. The fourth case of the 20022003 outbreak of SARS in the Pacific Rim reveals how disease can destabilize both international and domestic governance. Price-Smith argues that this novel coronavirus produced a moderate level of domestic institutional change in China and Canada, Review Essay 233 but did not prompt meaningful changes in global governance. Moreover, ‘‘moderate levels of fear-induced economic damage’’ threatened national stability in the Pacific Rim and thereby ‘‘constituted a direct threat to international security’’ (139). An interesting but underdeveloped facet of this case study is that global citizens used the Internet and cell phones to circumvent the suppression of health information by Chinese authorities. Thus, Price-Smith’s study of SARS suggests strategies of resistance of global germ governance, a topic that is ripe for further rhetorical analysis.25 Having demonstrated how outbreaks can contribute to political instability, Price-Smith then considers war as ‘‘disease amplifier’’ by analyzing previously unpublished World War I data from Austrian and German archives. He concludes, ‘‘such preliminary evidence reinforces the hypothesis that war and disease may operate synergistically as symbiotic externalities wherein the former extensively reinforces the latter’’ (18687). Wartime factors that may exacerbate the spread of pathogens include increased populations of civilians and combatants, reduced hygiene practices, demolished health infrastructure, mobility of disease vectors (i.e., troops and refugees), sexual coercion, and stress-reduced human immunity. Price-Smith closes his volume across two chapters, one that links health to security and one that offers a summary and set of recommendations. He first harkens back to Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, each of whom envisioned a role for infectious disease in security studies in their classical realist political treatises. He then locates a resurgence of explicit linkages between health and security through the Clinton and Bush II administrations, and with UN statements about how HIV/AIDS and SARS threatened global security. Disease and power are thus negatively linked. In his concluding chapter, Price-Smith argues that investing in global public health is the best way to limit future outbreaks. While he is correct that a more robust public health system will benefit the broader citizenry, a serious limitation of his work is that he inadequately addresses the perils of germ governance and the potential for abuse of unequal power relations. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic is a case in point. New evidence suggests that World Health Organization (WHO) leaders had a conflict of interest with regard to their reaction to the outbreak and thus pushed potentially unnecessary vaccines and safety precautions on citizens around the globe, an example that reveals the potential liabilities of linking disease and security in contexts where knowledge is uncertain or unavailable to large swaths of the citizenry.26 Price-Smith operates within a realist paradigm that seeks to subsume health under the aegis of security, yet a competing realist account arises in Klotz and Sylvester’s Breeding Bio Insecurity*one that characterizes the threat not as biological agents themselves but the largescale re-organization and proliferation of germs in response to fears of bioterrorism. Lynn C. Klotz of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and noted science journalist Edward J. Sylvester team up in this provocative tome to demonstrate how 9/11 and the anthrax attacks provided opportunities for a dramatic and risky expansion of US biodefense. These authors insist that our biodefense activities are making us more vulnerable because they have enrolled thousands of scientists in experiments on our most dangerous pathogens, thereby magnifying the potential for mishap. Like Price-Smith, Klotz and Sylvester want to reinvest in the nation’s public health infrastructure, but they want to do so by minimizing the focus on exotic bioweapons agents. A sense of exigency leaps from the pages of Breeding Bio Insecurity as it charts both wellknown and clandestine twentieth century germ initiatives. The notorious incidents include General Shiro Ishii’s human experiments at Japan’s Unit 731 during World War II, South Africa’s eugenically aimed Project Coast weapons development plan, the Soviet Union’s extensive biological weapons program, and Aum Shinrykio’s experiments with anthrax, 234 L. Keränen cholera, and Q fever. Yet even as the US government staged public biodefense exercises such as Dark Winter and TOPOFF (short for ‘‘top officials’’), three secret projects flaunted the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention during President Clinton’s time. In Project Jefferson, the US planned to engineer a strain of vaccine-resistant anthrax in order to test countermeasures. In Project Bacchus, the US Army built a mobile biological weapons unit in order to test the ease of construction. In Project Clear Vision, the CIA developed a ‘‘‘mock’ biological bomb’’ to learn how successfully such a weapon could disperse agents (88). After reviewing how this and similar newly expanded laboratory work could lead to infectious mistakes involving germs that do not respect national borders, Klotz and Sylvester outline weaknesses in biosafety oversight mechanisms. They examine the conflict over Boston University’s plan to build Biosafety Level (BSL-) 3 and 4 laboratories in a bustling Boston neighborhood, disclosing the existence of close to 15 BSL-4 laboratories where the deadly viruses ebola, lassa, and Marburg are studied. By contrast, routine killers such as methicillinresistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and HIV only require BSL-2 containment. Klotz and Sylvester argue that the US’s expansion of high containment laboratories may trigger another secret biological weapons arms race because other nations might perceive these laboratories as cover operations for offensive weapons development. Because of its strident tone and reliance on anticipated accidents or the possibilities of malevolent microbe use, Breeding Bio Insecurity engages in hyperbolic and hypothetical rhetoric similar to that of the government officials it criticizes. However, the book should be required reading for citizens unfamiliar with current biological weapons research, because it offers a captivating introduction to the harms of many biological and toxin weapons agents. Breeding Bio Insecurity also presents a compelling critique of President George W. Bush’s biodefense bonanza, which it characterizes in terms of paranoia and permissiveness and hence, as prompting a proliferation of risk. For scholars already working in this area, Breeding Bio Insecurity offers many useful gems, such as the recently revealed comment that President Nixon made upon signing the Biological Weapons Convention, which he called ‘‘that jackass treaty on biological warfare’’ (40). Moving out of the realm of polemic, the final volume, Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff ’s edited Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question, troubles the relationship between global security and health. Whereas Price-Smith argues that health and security need to be considered together, and Klotz and Sylvester vigorously maintain that biodefense is making us more vulnerable, this collection addresses the opportunities and limitations of national and international initiatives that seek to ‘‘secure health,’’ and ‘‘show[s] that ways of understanding and intervening in contemporary threats to health are still in formation’’ (9). In this account, ‘‘‘biosecurity’ does not name stable or clearly defined understandings and strategies, but rather a number of overlapping and rapidly changing problem areas’’ (89). The resulting essays form an impressive and thought-provoking collection that sets a high standard for researchers concerned with health governance. Lakoff and Collier’s Biosecurity Interventions addresses the refiguring of public health in response to emerging microbial threats. The first series of essays considers cases of US national preparedness, as several authors probe the role of simulations, exercises, and hypothetical models in the changing context of US security policy. Andrew Lakoff ’s ‘‘From Population to Vital System: National Security and the Changing Object of Public Health’’ chronicles the shift from public health prevention to public health preparedness by exploring how the prominently used scenario-based exercise organizes decision-making around the probability of future events. Thus, imaginative enactment of hypothesized future events guides planning, Review Essay 235 revealing how civil defense techniques migrate into the realm of public health ‘‘preparedness.’’ Lyle Fearnley’s ‘‘Redesigning Syndromic Surveillance for Biosecurity’’ investigates how the Centers for Disease Control and US military adapted epidemic surveillance for Project BioSense, which tracks emerging outbreaks, thereby transforming what were local public health practices into a national security strategy. In ‘‘How Did the Smallpox Vaccination Program Come About? Tracing the Emergence of Recent Smallpox Vaccination Thinking,’’ Dale A. Rose considers how an extinguished infectious disease with zero incidence becomes the imagined site of bioterrorist activity prompting a failed smallpox vaccination program. The logic of ‘‘preparedness,’’ coupled with imagined futures, bolstered the initiative, resulting in a rich set of institutional texts for rhetorical analysis. The volume then turns to the issue of global health and emergency response. Erin Koch’s ‘‘Disease as Security Threat: Critical Reflections on the Global TB Emergency’’ explores the Directly Observed Treatment, Short Course program in post-Soviet Georgia, which Koch maintains appeals to funders because it purports to respond to outbreaks without addressing broader social and economic problems. Peter Redfield’s ‘‘Vital Mobility and the Humanitarian Kit’’ unpacks Médecins Sans Frontières’ ready-made, container-sized response kit, which can provide immediate intervention, while Nick Bingham and Steve Hinchliffe’s ‘‘Mapping the Multiplicities of Biosecurity’’ probes the WHO initiative of poultry culling in Cairo to reduce the risk of avian flu. Each of these studies reveals the challenges facing programs designed for global intervention, which are problematic because their very portability ignores underlying social and economic realities and local conditions. The next series of essays features the modernization of risks. Frédéric Keck’s ‘‘From Mad Cow Disease to Bird Flu: Transformations of Food Safety in France’’ reveals how an outbreak of BSE in France prompted a precautionary approach to food safety that subsumed veterinary authority under the newly formed French Food Safety Agency. Kathleen M. Vogel’s ‘‘Biodefense: Considering the Sociotechnical Dimension’’ considers how governmental debates about biodefense reveal tensions concerning transparency, openness, and information sharing. Current policy debates, she maintains, have often concentrated ‘‘primarily on technical solutions to the bioweapons problem,’’ eliding the broader sociotechnical assemblage (248). In ‘‘Anticipations of Biosecurity,’’ Carlo Caduff shows how concerns about anticipated biological threats and biosafety are embedded into virology. In particular, his case study reveals how scientists experimenting on the 1918 flu virus had to demonstrate that their science was not as risky as the media suggested. Paul Rabinow concludes Biosecurity Interventions with a dire assessment of the contemporary biosecurity landscape and the paradigm of acting urgently on unknown and incalculable, but vividly imagined, futures. Aping the logic of biosecurity planners with their hysterical array of hypothetical scenarios, he writes: ‘‘Not acting has consequences even if they are not knowable. Given that, let’s imagine, script, narrate, role play: the theater of the virtual has never been more apropos. And if nothing happens? Perhaps something ominous has been forestalled. Who knows for sure?’’ (283). His prose here recalls Jack Gladney’s rumination upon encountering the ‘‘airborne toxic event’’ in Don DeLillo’s White Noise: ‘‘Which was worse, the real condition or the self-created one, and did it matter?’’*a statement that suggests the complexity of manufactured risks.27 On a more sober note, however, Rabinow insists that ‘‘one must never lose sight of the fact that these [biosecurity] experts operate within a partially self-constructed set of milieus and venues characterized by a vertiginous whipping motion of too much information countered but not complemented by too little information’’ (281). Such is our present predicament as international organizations and 236 L. Keränen citizens around the globe struggle to prepare for the unknown possibilities presented by pathogens. Perhaps, like DeLillo’s Gladney, we remain unsure how best to react. It is no accident that I began this review with Wald and ended it with Collier and Lakoff ’s volume, for of the five books reviewed in this essay, these offer the strongest models for a rhetorically invested biocriticism. Wald supplies an exemplar of careful, historically sensitive textual analysis that links germs to national identity and imagined communities, while the essays in Collier and Lakoff reveal a key set of governance dilemmas whose suasive dynamics demand closer scrutiny. Because of their ability to situate texts in deep historical contexts, rhetoricians can, like Wald, bring much to the study of epidemic discourses by tracking their influence, mutation, and effects across various texts, times, and places. Moreover, by extending the themes presented in Collier and Lakoff ’s volume, rhetoricians can uncover the inner workings, tensions, and consequences of contemporary rhetorical and material responses to perceived infectious threats on a global scale. When considered together, all five books reviewed in this essay testify to the durability and power of pathogens as objects whose material reality and changing symbolism become deeply embedded in broader cultural narratives and emerging forms of governance and security. Together, they disclose how our responses to real and imagined germs reshape our understandings of self and other, nation and community, and risk and safety. These books further reveal a complex collage of relationships between biological entities and the social groups and cultural formations that organize around them. In so doing, they justify the need for ongoing rhetorical engagement with the set of texts, artifacts, material formations, and discursive regimes underwriting our co-evolving relationship with manufactured and natural germs. In the final section of this essay, I return to the concept of biocriticism by advancing three possible lines of rhetorical investigation: articulations of germs and security, rhetorics of risk, and biological citizenship. Some Possibilities for a Rhetorically Inflected Biocriticism Responding to the perceived proliferation of pathogens and their discourses in an era of globalization, a project of biocriticism, narrowly conceived, would seek to uncover, analyze, and question the evolving symbolic and material rhetorics of germs, disease, and contagion and place them in broader conversation with politics, security, and culture. This initiative would amplify (and provide opportunities to strengthen the relations among) several existing strands of scholarship within public address, argument studies, the rhetoric of science, cultural/rhetorical studies of medicine, and biopolitical analysis. First, biocriticism of germ and security discourses, particularly across the twentieth century, would begin to fill a wide gap in our (pre- and post-) Cold War and post-9/11 rhetorical history. From the experimental reports of Fort Detrick through the scientific and public communiqués about germ warfare and biological terrorism, public and technical arguments about germ discourses remain largely unaddressed in our field. Second, biocriticism of the rhetoric of viruses, bacteria, funguses, and novel pathogens would allow rhetoricians of science to further understand the traffic between virology and other cultural forms, thereby deepening our explanations of the relationships among scientific knowledge, popular cultural forms, and commercial and academic enterprises.28 Third, biocriticism would enlarge the body of research that might be classified under the domain of ‘‘rhetorical and cultural studies of medicine and health,’’ particularly by providing a basis for comparison of various viral discourses over time and by tracking the relationships among history, culture, symbols, material, and emerging disease Review Essay 237 29 rhetorics. Finally, biocriticism would bring rhetorical studies into conversation with a growing effort operating largely (although not entirely) outside of communication studies that seeks to revise and elaborate the Foucauldian concepts of biopower and biopolitics.30 Here, rhetorically inflected biocriticism would uncover the strategies governing individual and collective health, and would offer insight into the emerging subjectivities converging around aspects of biological existence. To offer but a few brief examples of the kind of work I am suggesting, one initial line of inquiry should excavate what is at stake in the recent co-articulation of germs and security. Positing ‘‘public health security’’ as a new security paradigm transfers concerns about infectious disease, food safety, and biological weapons to the realm of security. Given our attention to the significance of discursive shifts, rhetorical and communication scholars are well poised to offer genealogies of the emergence of ‘‘biosecurity,’’ ‘‘biodefense,’’ and ‘‘public health security’’ and to chart how the discourses of epidemics and contagion function across contexts. Questions for further investigation include: How did we move from public health ‘‘prevention’’ to the paradigm of biosecurity ‘‘preparedness’’? For what exactly are we preparing? What does it mean to say we have an epidemic of obesity, for example, or to talk about immigrants in terms of social contagion?31 How are our stories about germs laden with problematic, contested, or liberating visions of gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and ability? What does the proliferating visual iconography of contagion suggest about the dilemmas and anxieties of our contemporary, globalized moment? How are our responses to health issues increasingly personalized even as they are globalized? And what can we conclude about the commercial and economic interests that drive biodefense research and development? Second, the proliferation of risk discourses surrounding contagion demands ongoing rhetorical analysis. Price-Smith, Wald, and Klotz and Sylvester suggest in varying degrees that inaccurate risk perception fuels germ panic that can disrupt economic and social relations. By contrast, the essays in Biosecurity Interventions and Dread stress the mismatch between planning for imagined risks and the empirical data detailing actual infections and known killers. For instance, since 9/11 the US government has spent more than $50 billion on civilian biodefense, representing $2 billion for each known victim of bioterrorism.32 By contrast, tens of thousands of our citizens die each year from medical mistakes and other preventable conditions.33 Given that germ discourses chiefly are configured in terms of risk with tangible personal, political, and economic outcomes, rhetoricians should be playing a greater role in demonstrating the underlying logics, deployments, and outcomes of the discourses of risk* and in disentangling their economic, political, and cultural stakes. By tracking risk constructions surrounding both real and envisioned epidemics, rhetoricians can show how the ‘‘communicability’’ of risks influences policy and practice. The anticipatory and imagined aspects of biosecurity planning, with their ubiquitous role plays and risk modeling, simulations and speculations, deserve special scrutiny because these modes of rhetorical invention drive future political and scientific action.34 Here, rhetoricians and communication scholars can build on the theoretical work on risk by Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Joost Van Loon, and Barbara Adam, and add to the rhetorical scholarship of Jeffrey Grabill and Michele Simmons, Robert Danisch, J. Blake Scott, and Beverly Sauers, by tracing the constitution, contestation, elaboration, and consequences of our rhetorics of pathogenic risk.35 Third, the terms ‘‘biological citizenship’’ and ‘‘biosocialities,’’ which refer to individual and collective identities based around particular biological indices, signify the new subjectivities and social movements that are forming around biological categories.36 Future research should examine the rhetorical tropes and strategies used by those who seek to counter or promote a 238 L. Keränen particular aspect of biological being. In the case of biodefense, this would include studies of the rhetoric of NGOs like the now-defunct Sunshine Project, which sought to counter biological weapons, and grassroots organizers like those featured in Breeding Bio Insecurity, who rose up against a germ laboratory in their Boston neighborhood. Outside the realm of biodefense, a number of emergent biological identities challenge biomedical knowledge and dominant ascriptions of health responsibility. As anthropologist Charles Briggs observes, epidemics ‘‘catalyze counter-narratives that challenge geographies of blame.’’37 Future studies might examine how identities are forged around particular biological categories such as ‘‘HIVpositive,’’ ‘‘AIDS dissident,’’ or ‘‘Vaccine Resistor,’’ and demonstrate how these identities reinterpret health responsibility.38 Here, the formation of new biological subjectivities may indicate changing epistemological, political, and aesthetic conventions that merit critical inspection. From analyses of government reports concerning pandemic preparedness through studies of epidemic discourses as they circulate international contexts, biocriticism would apply the full range of rhetorical analytics to a disparate but salient set of texts, contexts, rhetors, images, materials, institutions, and assemblages. By analyzing the narratives, metaphors, themes, topoi, genres, and discursive formations of epidemic rhetoric across a wide swath of texts and time periods, rhetorical and communication scholars can offer socially relevant rhetorical criticism and begin to formulate productive responses to the competing public arguments about germs that unfold across domains. Some of the particular documents that merit attention include global governance statements of the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control, Epidemic Intelligence Service, National Institutes of Health, and other national and international health agencies. Published and declassified studies of germ agents and their potential as biological weapons similarly remain largely untapped. But so do many discourses about public health and civil defense, as well as those concerning emerging epidemic threats. Cinematic, televisual, novelistic, and popular culture representations of biohorror, contagion, and pathogens also merit attention, for these imagined epidemics supply a core set of viral images for many citizens. Indeed, with the exception of Wald, the works reviewed in this essay did not address the visual iconography of epidemics in any substantive way. Yet the rising prominence of germ imagery in popular forms suggests the need for studies of how such visual rhetoric encodes the ‘‘virulent abject’’ and to what effect.39 My extended treatment of biodefense throughout this essay has configured biocriticism narrowly to highlight relationships between germs and security. However, I want to close by gesturing toward a broader version of biocriticism that would apply the complement of rhetorical tools (and for those inclined and able, those of allied fields such as anthropology, sociology, and science studies) to more fully engage the (post-) Foucauldian project of biopolitics.40 Such a project would extend our understanding of what rhetorician of science John Lyne termed bio-rhetoric, ‘‘a strategy for inventing and organizing discourses about biology in such a way that they mesh with the discourses of social, political, or moral life,’’ and it would expand the fledgling studies of virus discourse in our field.41 In this broader inflection, biocriticism would address the range of discursive formations and material practices that comprise ‘‘life’’ by investigating ‘‘vitality,’’ the politics, possibilities, and perils of ‘‘making live.’’42 Ideally, such a project would transcend the focus on thanatopolitics that characterizes so much of the contemporary biopolitics scholarship, with its emphasis on the Holocaust and end-of-life issues.43 Rabinow and Rose, for instance, describe ‘‘the new political economy of vitality,’’ wherein ‘‘transnational flows of knowledge, cells, tissues and intellectual property are coupled with local intensifications and regulated by supranational institutions,’’ Review Essay 239 involving ‘‘mobilizations of persons, tissues, organs, pathogens and therapeutics,’’ in processes that form new biologically based subjectivities.44 Thus, biocriticism in this broadened form would engage the evolving symbolic and material rhetorics of a host of vital practices, including but not limited to genetic engineering, non-lethal weaponry, medical ethics, neurobiology, biopharmacology, transhumanism, biogovernance, and stem-cell medicine, and it would examine how each of these prompts new visions of identity and belonging.45 Ultimately, both the narrow and broad forms of biocriticism will garner the most impact when rhetoricians produce programmatic research with an eye toward productive criticism and collaborative stakeholder engagement. In this way, biocritical rhetoricians can move beyond the preliminary step of illuminating germ discourses in particular cases and the secondary step of building mid-level theory about germ discourses across cases. The aim would be for biocritical rhetoricians to develop long-term, interdisciplinary partnerships concerned with the policy implications, political stakes, and potential alternatives of various bio-rhetorics.46 The project I advocate would therefore entail a productive turn that would help scholars and stakeholders begin to envision alternate ways of addressing the intersections of human and microbial life.47 Anthrax Gothic supplies one vision of the shifting human/germ interface where a bulky, twenty-first century Pa and Fille Farmer confront a brave new world of manufactured and naturally evolving germs from behind the face shields of biohazard suits, their gas-masked visages registering an almost post-human identity. Even as the cartoon pokes fun at pathogenic panic, it depicts a transformation of our Puritan past into a haunting, biologically infected future where protection from germs*or perhaps from a slow and seeping environmental apocalypse*is requisite equipment for daily living. As the books reviewed in this essay and the image of Anthrax Gothic so powerfully illustrate, we are undergoing a fundamental re-ordering of the relations between bios and culture in our biotechnologically saturated, germ-conscious, post-9/11 era. Biocriticism offers one way for rhetoricians to begin to understand and perhaps counter these vexing developments and begin to untangle their contested threads as humans and microbes continue to co-evolve in contingent and uncharted ways. Notes [1] [2] [3] American Gothic appears at the Art Institute of Chicago and may be viewed online at ‘‘About this Artwork: American Gothic,’’ July 27, 2010, http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/ 6565. What I have taken to calling ‘‘Anthrax Gothic’’ appeared in the San Diego UnionTribune on October 11, 2001, by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Steve Breen, who granted permission for its use in this essay. The image may be accessed online by entering the date of the cartoon into Daryl Cagle’s Political Cartoonists search engine: http:// www.cagle.com/politicalcartoons/pccartoons/archives/breen.asp?Action GetImage. This phrase from an ‘‘unnamed organizer’’ of the Atlantic Storm biodefense exercise appears in ‘‘Not Science Fiction,’’ Washington Post, January 27, 2005, A18. The unnamed source is likely Tara O’Toole, formerly of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity, who, as Under Secretary for Science and Technology of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Division, is now President Obama’s de facto biosecurity advisor, a fact that reveals the tight coupling of biodefense insiders and the US government. I chart what is now more than $50 billion in US spending on civilian biodefense in ‘‘How Does a Pathogen Become a Terrorist? The Collective Transformation of Risk into Bio(in)security’’ in Rhetorical Questions in Health and Medicine, ed. Joan Leach and Deborah Dysart-Gale (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 85120. 240 L. Keränen [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] Heather Schell observed that in the 1990s the US became ‘‘infected with virus metaphors’’ in ‘‘Outburst! A Chilling True Story About Emerging-Virus Narratives and Pandemic Social Change,’’ Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 5 (1997): 94. Some worthwhile germ scholarship from other disciplines includes historian Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor’s Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2003); security analyst Jonathan B. Tucker’s edited collection of biological and chemical weapons case studies, Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000); ‘‘Contagion and Culture,’’ a 2002 special issue of American Literary History edited by English professor Priscilla Wald, historian Nancy Tomes, and journalism professor Lisa Lynch; see ‘‘Introduction: Contagion and Culture,’’ American Literary History 14 (2002): 61724; Americanist Ruth Mayer’s ‘‘Virus Discourse: The Rhetoric of Threat and Terrorism in the Biothriller,’’ Cultural Critique 66 (2007): 120; and English professor Stephen Dougherty’s ‘‘The Biopolitics of the Killer Virus Novel,’’ Cultural Critique 48 (2001): 129. See also Cynthia J. Davis, ‘‘Contagion as Metaphor,’’ American Literary History 14 (2002): 82836; and Heather Schell, ‘‘The Sexist Gene: Science Fiction and the Germ Theory of History,’’ American Literary History 14 (2002): 80527. An example from communication studies may be found in Rebecca A. Weldon, ‘‘An ‘Urban Legend’ of Global Proportion: An Analysis of Nonfiction Accounts of the Ebola Virus,’’ Journal of Health Communication 6 (2001): 28194. Finally, the Journal of Health Communication published a 2003 special issue concerning communication following the anthrax attacks. See especially Susan J. Robinson, and Wendy C. Newstetter, ‘‘Uncertain Science and Certain Deadlines: CDC Responses to the Media During the Anthrax Attacks of 2001,’’ Journal of Health Communication 8 (2003, Supplement 1): 1734. Melinda Cooper, ‘‘Pre-empting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War on Terror,’’ Theory, Culture, & Society 23 (2006): 113. I should note that although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, biodefense, biosecurity, and biosafety often mean different things, with biosecurity having a broader focus. The differences (and their implications) should be subject to close rhetorical analysis. Reviews of nuclear criticism include Bryan C. Taylor and Stephen John Hartnett, ‘‘‘National Security, and All That it Implies . . .’: Communication and (Post-) Cold War Culture,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 86 (2000): 46587; and Bryan C. Taylor, ‘‘Nuclear Weapons and Communication Studies: A Review Essay,’’ Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 30015. E. Johanna Hartelius provides a review of recent rhetoric of medicine scholarship in ‘‘Review Essay: Sustainable Scholarship and the Rhetoric of Medicine,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 45770. See also Judy Z. Segal’s Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). Studies of biopolitics in rhetorical studies include but are not limited to J. Blake Scott, Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003); J. Blake Scott, ‘‘Kairos as Indeterminate Risk Management: The Pharmaceutical Industry’s Response to Bioterrorism,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 11543; and Jeffrey A. Bennett, Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009). Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). I had a productive and enjoyable conversation about epidemic discourses with Jeffrey Bennett, Isaac West, Megan Foley, and John Lynch at the Fall 2010 Public Address Conference in Pittsburgh. West and Bennett reminded me that Gordon R. Mitchell and Kathleen M. McTigue have an essay on the ‘‘now endemic’’ use of the term epidemic to Review Essay 241 [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] describe obesity, ‘‘The US Obesity ‘Epidemic’: Metaphor, Method, or Madness?’’ Social Epistemology 21 (2007): 391423. For a fascinating overview of the shifting senses of the word epidemic from Homer through the twentieth century, see Paul M. V. Martin and Estelle Martin-Granel, ‘‘2,500-year Evolution of the Term Epidemic (Historical Review),’’ Emerging Infectious Disease 12 (2006): 977, September 15, 2010, http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol12no06/051263.htm. Even schizophrenia has recently been reconfigured in terms of ‘‘the insanity virus’’; see Douglas Fox, ‘‘The Insanity Virus,’’ Discover, November 8, 2010, November 20, 2010, http:// discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity-virus. Paula Treichler uses this phrase in How To Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 1. Just a few of the scores of films that feature this vision include Danny Boyle, dir., 28 Days Later (United Kingdom: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2002) and Francis Lawrence’s remake of the 1971 Omega Man, I am Legend (United States: Warner Brothers, 2007). José Saramago’s brilliant and haunting pandemic novel Blindness (New York: Harvest Books, 1998), which later became a major motion picture, also deserves mention. I am grateful that my research assistant Jennifer Malkowski, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, has created elaborate tables of germrelated motion pictures, novels, television shows, and documentaries to help me chart this terrain. Much film criticism addresses the 1990s film Outbreak. See Walter Metz, ‘‘From Microfilm to Microbes: Outbreak as Post-Cold War Thriller,’’ in Engaging Film Criticism: Film History and Contemporary American Cinema (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 2344; and Schell, ‘‘Outburst!’’ Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff, ‘‘The Problem of Securing Health,’’ in Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question, ed. Andrew Lakoff and Stephen J. Collier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 9. Richard M. Clendenin supplies an account of bacteriological weapons work at Fort Detrick in Science and Technology at Fort Detrick, 19431968 (Frederick, MD: US Army, 1968). In 1941, the National Academy of Science’s (NAS) War Bureau of Consultation, commissioned by Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stimson, recommended creating a bacteriological weapons research program. In 1942, President Roosevelt asked Stimson to start the War Research Service, which was then directed by George Merck at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. In November of 1942, the War Research Service requested that the Chemical Warfare Service develop a biological weapons research and development initiative to be overseen by Dr. Ira Baldwin. Construction began at Detrick in 1943. For an overview of this program, see Phillip R. Pittman, Sarah L. Norris, Kevin M. Coonan, and Kelly T. McKee, Jr., ‘‘An Assessment of Health Status Among Medical Research Volunteers Who Served in the Project Whitecoat Program at Fort Detrick, Maryland,’’ Military Medicine 170 (2005): 18387. See Theodor Rosebury, Peace or Pestilence: Biological Warfare and How to Avoid It (New York: Whittlesey, 1949); and David E. Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (New York: Doubleday, 2009). Rosebury left Detrick in 1945 and spoke out against biological warfare. My current book project, tentatively titled Envisioning Viral Apocalypse: A Rhetorical History of Biological Weapons from World War II to the War on Terror, examines changing visions of viral apocalypse in biodefense discourse across technical, political, and entertainment domains. For a representative work concerning the post-9/11 period, see Keränen, ‘‘How Does a Pathogen Become a Terrorist?’’ Jeanne Guillemin’s Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) offers a great starting point for scholars interested in the international history of biological weapons development in the twentieth century and offers a set of texts and contexts ripe for further 242 L. Keränen [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] analysis. One new investigation of nuclear imagery is Ned O’Gorman and Kevin Hamilton, ‘‘At the Interface: The Loaded Rhetorical Gestures of Nuclear Legitimacy and Illegitimacy,’’ Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8 (2011): 4166. Christopher J. Davis, ‘‘Nuclear Blindness: An Overview of the Biological Weapons Programs of the Former Soviet Union and Iraq,’’ Emerging Infectious Diseases 5 (1999): 50912. Alibek also shared news of ‘‘hundreds of tons’’ of anthrax bacteria ready for loading on intercontinental ballistic missiles, among other horrifying tales. Tim Weiner, ‘‘Soviet Defector Warns of Biological Weapons,’’ New York Times, February 25, 1998, A1, A8; and Ken Alibek and Steven Handelman, Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World; Told From Inside by the Man Who Ran It (New York: Random House, 1999). Tales of the chimera virus or spliced ‘‘super-germ’’ appear in Hoffman, The Dead Hand; and Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad, Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), which in kairotic fashion arrived in bookstores on 9/11. The New York Times article detailing President Clinton’s engagement with Preston’s work may be found at ‘‘About Richard Preston,’’ December 2, 2010, http://richardpreston.net/ about-richard-preston. Schell, ‘‘Outburst,’’ 94. Cooper, ‘‘Pre-empting Emergence,’’ 113. Cooper, ‘‘Pre-empting Emergence,’’ 113. Cooper used British spellings (‘‘defence’’), which I changed. Bill Frist as quoted in Milton Leitenberg, ‘‘Bioterrorism, Hyped,’’ Los Angeles Times, February 17, 2006, B13. For a study of autism rhetoric, see Dennis A. Lynch, ‘‘Rhetorics of Proximity: Empathy in Temple Grandin and Cornel West,’’ Rhetoric Society Quarterly 28 (1998): 523. Huiling Ding offers an analysis of SARS communication that picks up some of these themes in ‘‘Rhetorics of Alternative Media in an Emerging Epidemic: SARS, Censorship, and ExtraInstitutional Risk Communication,’’ Technical Communication Quarterly 18 (2009): 32750. Rob Stein, ‘‘Reports Accuse WHO of Exaggerating H1N1 Threat, Possible Ties to Drug Makers,’’ The Washington Post, June 4, 2010, January 4, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost. com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/06/04/AR2010060403034_pf.html. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1986), 126. Admittedly, much existing work in this area tracks militant metaphors of contagion, but there is room for considering other forms of representation and influence. In terms of how fear of bioterrorism might affect academic research, Barry R. Bloom speculates in ‘‘Bioterrorism and the University: The Threats to Security*and to Openness,’’ Harvard Magazine (NovemberDecember 2003), January 4, 2011, http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/ 11/bioterrorism-and-the-uni.html. While my focus for readers of the Quarterly Journal of Speech concerns rhetorical interventions, critical and interpretive health communication scholars obviously have much to contribute to biocriticism as well. Examples of cultural/rhetorical studies scholarship concerning HIV include Treichler, How to Have Theory; Scott, Risky Rhetoric; and Bennett, Banning Queer Blood. See, for starters, Michel Foucault, ‘‘The Right of Death and Power over Life,’’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 25872; and The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 19781979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, ‘‘Biopower Today,’’ Biosocieties 1 (2006): 195217; Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas, ‘‘Biological Citizenship,’’ in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 43963. Review Essay 243 [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] For a fine example of this line of scholarship, see J. David Cisneros, ‘‘Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of Immigrant as Pollutant in Media Representations of Immigration,’’ Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11 (2008): 569601. Crystal Franco, ‘‘Billions for Biodefense: Federal Agency Biodefense Funding, FY2008FY2009,’’ Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science 6 (2008): 13146. The figure $49 million appears on page 131 and though substantial, represents but 0.26 percent of the federal budget, yet subsequent studies have pushed the figure above $50. See Keränen, ‘‘How Does a Pathogen Become a Terrorist?’’ The $2 billion per victim figure comes from Alan Reynolds, ‘‘WMD Doomsday Distractions,’’ reprinted in The Cato Institute Online (2005), August 3, 2008, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id 4235. The Institute of Medicine’s 1999 report ‘‘To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System’’ details that somewhere between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die each year from preventable medical errors. A brief version of the report, January 4, 2011, is available online at http:// www.iom.edu/ /media/Files/Report%20Files/1999/To-Err-is-Human/To%20Err%20is%20 Human%201999%20%20report%20brief.pdf. See Keränen, ‘‘How Does a Pathogen Become a Terrorist?’’ and Keränen, ‘‘Bio(In)Security: Rhetoric, Scientists, and Citizens in the Age of Bioterrorism,’’ in Sizing Up Rhetoric, ed. David Zarefsky and Elizabeth Benacka (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2008), 22749. Robert Danisch recently argued that ‘‘the tremendous ‘success’ of scientific research and technological development now acts to produce uncertainty, fear, and danger. As such, science and technology stand at the center of contemporary political rhetoric in a radically different way’’; see ‘‘Political Rhetoric in a World Risk Society,’’ Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40 (2010): 173; Danisch wants to explore how to sustain political culture in the face of such techno-scientific rationality, an important task indeed. While his focus on political culture advances a different project than the one I have in mind, his treatment of risk suggests the importance of this line of inquiry. See also Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2009); Van Loon, Risk and Technological Culture; Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck, and Joost Van Loon, eds., The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory (London: Sage, 2000); Jeffrey T. Grabill and W. Michele Simmons, ‘‘Toward a Critical Rhetoric of Risk Communication: Producing Citizens and the Role of Technical Communicators,’’ Technical Communication Quarterly 7 (1998): 41541; Scott, Risky Rhetoric; and Beverly Sauer, The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003). Rose and Novas, ‘‘Biological Citizenship.’’ Charles L. Briggs, ‘‘Communicability, Racial Discourse, and Disease,’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005): 279. Brigg’s review essay may be heuristic for rhetoricians interested in biocriticism, particularly as it maps out social inequalities related to disease. Dan Brouwer, ‘‘The Precarious Visibility Politics of Self-Stigmatization: The Case of HIV/ AIDS Tattoos,’’ Text and Performance Quarterly 18 (1998): 11436. Joost Van Loon’s concept of the ‘‘viral abject’’ draws from Julia Kristeva and appears in his Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence (New York: Routledge, 2002), 86. See Kristeva’s notion of the abject in ‘‘Powers of Horror,’’ The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 22963. Melinda Cooper’s Life as Surplus: Biotechnology, Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008) examines a host of cases well suited for rhetorical analysis. Interested readers should also consult Rose, The Politics of Life Itself. In 1987, rhetorician John Lyne first used the term bio-rhetoric to describe ‘‘a systematic strategy for mediating between the life sciences and social life,’’ in ‘‘Learning the Lessons of Lysenko: Biology, Rhetoric, and Politics in Historical Controversy,’’ Argument and Critical Practice, ed. Joseph Wenzel et al. (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1987), 527. The quotation here appeared in ‘‘Bio-rhetorics: Moralizing the Life Sciences,’’ in 244 L. Keränen [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, ed. Herbert W. Simons (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990), 38. In addition to the research on HIV referenced above and below, one rhetoric scholar who has produced several studies of virus discourse is Carol Reeves. See ‘‘Owning a Virus: The Rhetoric of Scientific Discovery Accounts,’’ Rhetoric Review 10 (1992): 32136. ‘‘Making live’’ (faire vivre) contrasts with the power of the sovereign to take life. See Michel Foucault, ‘‘Faire Vivre et Laisser Mourir: La Naissance du Racisme,’’ Les Temps Modernes 535 (1991): 3761; and Rabinow and Rose, ‘‘Biopower Today,’’ 195, where ‘‘making live’’ is defined as ‘‘strategies for the governing of life.’’ For an example of the thanatopolitical view of biopolitics par excellence, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). There is a growing body of work in rhetoric studies that addresses thanatopolitics, and though I am lately seeking an alternate view of biopower, much of it is useful and important. My point, following Rabinow and Rose, is simply that ‘‘the field of biopolitics operates according to logics of vitality, not mortality: while it has its circuits of exclusion, letting die is not making die’’ (Rabinow and Rose, ‘‘Biopower Today,’’ 211). The work I reference in our field includes Megan Foley, ‘‘Voicing Terri Schiavo: Prosopopeic Citizenship in the Democratic Aporia Between Sovereignty and Biopower,’’ Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7 (2010): 381400; and Todd McDorman, ‘‘Controlling Death: Bio-Power and the Right-to-Die Controversy,’’ Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2 (2005): 25779. Interested readers should also consult Michael Hyde’s groundbreaking work on end-of-life communication, especially his ‘‘Medicine, Rhetoric, and Euthanasia: A Case Study in the Workings of Postmodern Discourse,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 201 24; and his Call of Conscience: Heidegger and Levinas, Rhetoric and the Euthanasia Debate (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008). Rabinow and Rose, ‘‘Biopolitics Today,’’ 215. Hyde’s work concerning transhumanism, especially Perfection: Coming to Terms With Being Human (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), is required reading. So are Celeste Condit’s studies of the rhetoric of the genome, especially The Meanings of the Gene: Public Debates about Heredity (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). See also John Lynch, ‘‘Stem Cells and the Embryo: Biorhetoric and Scientism in Congressional Debate,’’ Public Understanding of Science 18 (2009): 30924. Susan Herbst’s call for long-term, functional communication studies is thought provoking. See her ‘‘Disciplines, Intersections, and the Future of Communication Research,’’ Journal of Communication 58 (2008): 60314. However, whereas Herbst sees theory development across contexts as a desirable end of communication scholarship, I further seek engaged scholarship that seeks to build collaborative scholarly works into forms useful to stakeholder populations. As I was putting the finishing touches on this essay, I had the opportunity to work with other rhetoricians of science on a position paper concerning the need for collaborative cross-disciplinary research relationships. See the forthcoming opinion by David Gruber, Jordynn Jack, Lisa Keränen, John M. McKenzie, and Matthew B. Morris called ‘‘Rhetoric and the Neurosciences: Engagement and Exploration,’’ POROI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention. Robert L. Ivie, ‘‘Productive Criticism Then and Now,’’ American Communication Journal 4 (2001): 14.