C. Colwell

Villanova University
ccolwell@ucis.vill.edu

 

. . . and the moral of that is — “Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.”

 

–the Duchess.¹

 

AIDS, like cancer, syphilis, cholera, leprosy and bubonic plague before it, has woven the threads of our biological, social and moral existence together into a complex disease entity that is much more than the physical interaction between its cause(s) and the human organism. It presents those already marginalized individuals and communities most affected by it (so far) with personal and political challenges that threaten their social and their physical existence. And it presents the scientific and medical community with a challenge and puzzle that equals, if not surpasses, those that have preceded it. But it is a mistake to separate these two arenas (social/political and scientific) as they inscribe on one another their codes of sense and meaning in a hyper-dialectic of transcription and reverse transcription. It is, as such, a mistake to take the biological objects offered to us by science (specifically the HIV virus) as referents free from infection by meanings ideally supposed to be excluded from its domain. What I will attempt in the following is to mobilize Gilles Deleuze’s notion of sense, as he presents it in The Logic of Sense,² as a strategy for understanding the direction that the meaning of AIDS has taken and as a means of multiplying other directions that it might take.

 

As a preliminary sketch of the strategy that I will draw out of Deleuze I want to distinguish between three levels, strata or series that his discussion of sense will deal with: thoughts, things, and sense/events. Thoughts, insofar as they have meaning (are meaningful, make sense), are a function of language, i.e., the form and matter of their expression is that of language. But meaning is about or of things.³ As Michel Foucault notes in The Birth of the Clinic, the problem lies in the relation between words and things.⁴The Logic of Sense is directed at that gap between words and things in an attempt to understand what it is that bridges the gap, what inhabits the interval. Briefly, Deleuze uses the term “states of affairs” to refer to things and begins his analysis of words with propositions. Between the two he locates a realm of “sense” and “event” (which he equates as two sides of a plane without thickness). It seems to me that it is to the sense/event that we must direct our attention if we are to address the multi-faceted (social, political, economic and scientific) phenomenon of AIDS.

 

The first section of this essay is an explication of Deleuze’s notions of sense and event as a propadeutic to addressing the specific sense/event of AIDS. Deleuze’s approach is particularly useful here as it provides a conceptual strategy that accounts for the complex interactions between those arenas of meaning that are traditionally (and mistakenly) held separate while avoiding the mirror image errors of positivism and linguistic idealism to which much of post-Kantian philosophy of language is prone. In the second section I turn to the sense/event of AIDS, addressing in particular the social, political, economic and scientific dominance of the HIV model. I conclude by suggesting the ways in which this strategy allows us to pervert and transform the current hegemonic model of AIDS in all its facets. Let me stress at this point that I am using Deleuze’s work as a strategy here instead of as a conceptual model. As will become clear towards the end of this essay I am less concerned with developing a “better” conceptual model of AIDS than I am with perverting the dominant model(s).

 

I. Sense/Event

 

Although, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes,⁵ Deleuze largely bypasses those thinkers who have treated the question of sense in the last century, it is worth briefly addressing Gottlob Frege’s analysis of sense. In his seminal paper “On Sense and Reference (Meaning)”⁶ Frege distinguishes between the “mode of presentation” of a sign (sense) and that which the sign designates (reference). His purpose here is to give an adequate account of the functioning of propositions that contain signs that either have no referent (e.g., propositions in which “Odysseus” is the subject) or cases in which propositions containing different signs have the same referent (“morning star,” “evening star,” and Venus). While Frege rehearses a form of neo-positivism and privileges reference (due to its truth value function) to the detriment of sense there is one point worth noting here. Frege asserts that sense has a certain objectivity, that it is not subjective since it can be, and is, the property of more than one thinker. As such, Frege equates sense with thought (here thought is not the result of a thinker’s mental activity but that which a thinker “grasps”) and positions it between the subjective ideas of thinkers and the objects to which thought refers.

 

The striking thing is that Frege moves the consideration of sense out of the realm of both subjects and objects. That is, a philosophy of sense is neither a philosophy of the subject (phenomenology/existentialism) nor a philosophy of the object (positivism), although in the end it is on the side of the object, the referent, that Frege positions himself.⁷ This notion of sense as residing in the “in-between” is one of the two notions I want to retain from Frege. As to the second, Deleuze plays on the multiple meanings of the French word sens, “meaning,” “direction” or sense as a faculty of perception. While I will mobilize all of these meanings I also want to retain Frege’s use of the term as a “mode of presentation.”

 

Deleuze arrives at the realm of sense from two directions, one beginning with words or propositions, the other beginning with things or states of affairs. From the standpoint of words, he begins with three relations within the proposition: denotation, (which links the proposition to particular things); manifestation (which links the proposition to the beliefs, intentions, etc., of a speaker); and signification (which links the proposition to general or universal concepts) (LS 12-14).⁸ The problem arises when we seek to understand which of these relations is the primary one, i.e., which functions as the ground of the other two. Depending on one’s standpoint, each of the three relations offers itself as primary. In speech (parole), manifestation is primary since it is the “I” which begins (to speak). This is, of course, Descartes’ position in which the cogito functions as the ground of all propositions; it is the I which, e.g., denotes this piece of wax (LS 14). In language (langue) however, it is signification which is primary. In language, propositions appear “only as premise[s] or conclusion[s]” (LS 15); here “this is a piece of wax” is a conclusion that subsumes its object under a universal category. (Deleuze does not offer the standpoint from which denotation would appear as primary but it is obvious enough: the “this-now-here” of sense certainty.)⁹ Deleuze argues that when we seek the primary relationship we find ourselves in a circle, “the circle of the proposition” (LS 17). None of these relations will function as the principle of the proposition, as the condition of the possibility of the proposition, as the link or relation between the proposition and what is external to the proposition.¹⁰

 

That relation is the fourth dimension of the proposition, sense. It is “the expressed of the proposition . . . an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition” (LS 19). Note that Deleuze reprises Frege’s notion that sense lies in between, though now it lies in between propositions and states of affairs instead of in between ideas and objects. Sense functions as the condition of the possibility of denotation, manifestation and signification (and thus of truth value — but also of paradox), as the linkage between propositions and events and, as such, between ideas and objects. Sense is the “coexistence of two sides without thickness . . . the expressed of the proposition and the attribute of the state of affairs” (LS 22). That is to say that sense is a characteristic of both words and things. It lies in between but is also at the surface of both and identified with neither (it is identified with the event to which I shall return to below).

 

To a certain extent Deleuze leaves sense undefined and this necessarily so, since the sense of a proposition can never be an object of denotation or signification of the same proposition, as it is always presupposed in denotation and signification (LS 29-30).¹¹ That is, when one makes the sense of a proposition (P₁) explicit in another proposition (P₂) the second (P₂) always has another sense which is itself presupposed and so on in an infinite regress. As such, any proposition that attempts to offer a definition of sense will itself require another sense.¹² Moreover, sense is a property of expressions that have no denotation, manifestation, signification or expressions in which these functions miscarry, i.e., absurd and nonsensical statements. We get a clearer idea of sense by seeing how Deleuze distinguishes it from good sense and from common sense and how he links it with nonsense. Good sense is the sense of signification (LS 76). It is the sense that is ordered in one direction only, the sense of linear thinking.¹³ It is the sense, as Deleuze says, that “foresees” (LS 75), that is able to extrapolate from the present and the past in order to predict the becoming of the future based on past and current models. It is “good” sense precisely because it identifies the past, present and future as the Same, as a repetition of the Same in the face of the Other (a repetition that denies the possibility of the repetition of difference). Common sense is the sense that governs denotation (particularly the application of signification in denotation: this is a piece of wax) and manifestation (LS 77-8). It “identifies and recognizes” (LS 77). It identifies and recognizes both the self, the “I” that manifests, and the things which the self experiences. The two function complementarily as the identity of common sense provides a beginning and end (and thus a direction) for the movement of good sense and the action of good sense in bringing the manifold of experience under the categories of general signification provides the matter without which identity would remain empty (LS 78). Sense, itself, underlies both good and common sense in that it allows for multiple directions other than the one that any particular manifestation of good sense adopts, and, as the virtual ground of all actual identities, it potentially fragments any particular identity formed by common sense.

 

Nonsense, absurdity, expressions which violate the rules of good and common sense, have sense too, i.e., are sensical and sensible. “A round square” and “I am every name in history” respectively denote an impossible object, equate two inconsistent categories and fragment the identity of the one who speaks. Yet they nonetheless make sense and function expressively. The best example of this is Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky:

 

Twas brillig and the slithey toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe¹⁴

 

Even prior to Humpty Dumpty’s definition of these terms this poem functions, it expresses . . . something. The notion of sense that Deleuze elaborates is one that grounds the functioning of language in its widest range, that includes nonsense and the absurd rather than excluding such expressions to fit a theory. Nonsense is not the absence of sense; it is sense that fails to result in denotation or signification or manifestation. The import here is that (non)sense¹⁵ grounds the possibility of meanings, directions of thought, of research, and modes of presentation that are cut off by the illusory clarity of good and common sense.¹⁶

 

Moreover, because the Jabberwocky makes sense it functions to transport us into the event of the slaying of the Jabberwock. And it is through the event that the second avenue to the realm of sense lies. Before examining Deleuze’s theory of the event it is worth pausing a moment to look at what counts as events. Michel de Certeau says that “the event is first and foremost an accident, a misfortune, a crisis.”¹⁷ Writing on Deleuze, Foucault speaks of the event as “a wound, a victory-defeat, death,” the last being the “best example,”¹⁸ while in the context of Nietzsche he says it is a “reversal of a relationship of forces” in response to “haphazard conflicts.”¹⁹ Deleuze takes a similar position on the event, considering it primarily as some sort of calamity. My point in raising this issue is to note the emphasis in Deleuze’s work since in what follows I will adopt a wider view of what counts as an event. It seems to me that the synchronic state of a science functions as a state of affairs as it is the set of static relations between bodies (theories, methodologies, experimental technologies, laboratory practices, objects of knowledge, etc.) in an immediate present. As such, it will give rise to its own sense/event.

 

Events are the effects of the interactions of bodies but are not themselves bodily, corporeal (LS 4). Deleuze distinguishes events from states of affairs, which are the static set of relations that bodies, things, are found in at a particular point in time. When bodies interact they produce effects, events, which are not coextensive with themselves, insofar as they are states of affairs, and which do not inhere in the same time. The time of states of affairs is rectilinear time, a time of “interlocking presents,” that flows in a single direction, from past to future but in which, strictly speaking, past and future do not exist except as boundaries of the present (LS 4, 61-2). The time of the event, however, is a time without a present, a time of an unlimited past and an unlimited future, a time that is expressed in the infinitive form of verbs (LS 5, 61-2). To a great extent, the distinction is between the brute existence of physical things (both in themselves and in their static relations to one another) and the subsistence of an incorporeal entity that floats on the surface of things and constitutes the movement and duration of their becoming and of their sense.

 

Take disease. As a state of affairs we have a relation between two bodies, two organisms, an infectious organism and a human body. At any particular moment in the course of this disease there will be various states of affairs, an infection, the reproduction and multiplication of the microbe, a fever, an immunological response, a recovery, an exacerbation, etc. But the disease as an event does not inhere in the present. What is in the present is, on the one hand, biological interactions between infectious and infected organisms and, on the other hand, malaise, pain, suffering, etc. The disease, however, is always just past, and yet to come, more appropriately, it is always becoming, always expressed in the infinitive of the verb. As Lecercle notes, the actors in the midst of the event do not experience it as the event, as a single identity, even though the event inheres in all of their actions.²⁰ Insofar as we perceive the person with a disease, insofar as we sense her as having this disease, insofar as we treat and investigate her disease our attention is directed to something more than the body before our eyes, our treatment protocols, our instruments and our diagnostic devices, more than the series of bodies that present themselves to the medical gaze. Our technologically extended and enhanced senses are directed to the event of the disease, an event that is manifested in the body in front of us but which is never immediately present to us either temporally or spatially.

 

This second path to the realm of sense leads through the event because Deleuze equates sense and the event, indeed, sense is a “pure event” (LS 19, cf. 22). Sense and the event both lie in the “in-between” of words and things. They are the same “thing” from different aspects, two sides of a plane without thickness. Each aspect adheres to its respective dimension, sense to words, events to things, and to each other, sense/event. The in-between realm of sense/events is the place, or, rather, “non-place,” in which words and things mingle, rub up against each other, consorting with one another to produce effects. The issue of causality is important here since there are, at least, three series of cause-effect relations. The first series operates at the level of things, bodies producing effects on other bodies, changes in the states of affairs of those bodies (the scalpel that cuts, the organism that infects). The second series is that in which the interaction of bodies produces events (being cut, being sick). These events are ideational or incorporeal entities that have “logical or dialectical attributes” (LS 5), i.e., entities that have sense and which can generate meaning.

 

The third series is that of the interaction of events themselves, in which events produce effects on each other. The causal relation here is a weak one, Deleuze calls it a “quasi-cause” (LS 6), partly because there is no necessary relation between cause and effect among events, partly because of the difficulty of distinguishing whether the causes that produce the effects in events are those that arise from things or from other events. Insofar as Deleuze depicts events as hovering over things we may describe two horizontal series of causal relations (among things and among events) and one vertical series that flows from things to events.

 

Following this it seems to me that we can describe two other series of causal relations. The first (or fourth) is the horizontal relation between propositional structures. As Georges Canguilhem says, “theories never proceed from facts . . . [t]heories arise only out of earlier theories . . . facts are merely the path — and it is rarely a straight path — by which one theory leads to another.”²¹ Lastly, there is a transverse relation that moves from propositional structures to the level of the sense/event in which our ability to make explicit the sense of events can produce effects on meaning (with the proviso that we always presuppose another sense in doing so). It is by this avenue that we may produce transformations in the event itself. However, we must describe these relations as “quasi-causal” in nature because there is no strict necessity in operation that links these causes and effects. That is, good sense is not able to predict the effects of making the sense of an event explicit and common sense is not able to govern the denotation or manifestation of identities that arise as the effects of doing so.

 

In order to bring this conceptual strategy to bear on the event of AIDS I need to turn to one last notion in Deleuze, that of “actualization.” In a discussion of Henri Bergson’s theory of evolution²² Deleuze opposes the virtual-actual distinction to the possible-real distinction in order to show that actualization is the “mechanism of creation” (B 98). Here, the relation between the possible and the real is attributed to a “theological model of creation” in which the real is simply one of the many possibles, all of which resemble the real, that has been brought into existence.²³ Actualization, on the other hand, is the process in which the virtual differentiates itself in the active creation of something new, an actual which does not resemble the virtual from which it arose (B 97). The best example here is the relation between an organism and the genetic code of its DNA. It is through a process of actualization that the virtual structure of a strand of DNA generates an organism, the organism (phenotype) bearing no resemblance to its genotype.

 

We are now in a position to state the relation between sense/events and the meaning of propositions (denotation, manifestation, and signification as well as what Frege would term reference). Sense is the ground or condition of meaning, and thus of truth, but it is not a ground in the sense that it simply covers a wider range of possibilities, i.e., it does not stand in relation to reference as the possible to the real.²⁴ Instead, it has the relation of virtual to actual, meanings are generated by actualizing lines of difference from sense/events. This opens up a second possibility for transformation, this time the transformation of the propositional meaning of the event. Precisely because meaning does not stand in a relation of resemblance to sense, or to the event, the sense/event grounds multiple possible meanings.

 

We should note at this point that Deleuze’s notion of the sense/event does not function as either an epistemology or a metaphysics. That is, it does not function as a method for distinguishing between the truth and falsity of a particular proposition or set of propositions. And it does not provide us with a foundation for distinguishing between reality and appearance. Instead, the argument is that for any event, multiple meanings are possible, that the event can be actualized in multiple ways. And this allows for the possibility that the event of AIDS can be actualized in another way than it has been so far. Again, this is why I take Deleuze’s work to be strategic rather than conceptual model building. Rather than offering us a new way to construct the event it shows us the possibility of re-eventualizing the event, of setting it in motion again, of producing a thaw in the frozen river of “knowledge” that has fixed the event along a particular line of actualization.

 

II. The Sense/Event of AIDS

 

With the general outlines of this conceptual strategy in place I will now turn to the event of AIDS. What I will show is that the relations of (quasi)causality and lines of actualization of AIDS run through the in-between of sense/events in an extremely complex manner. The essential point here is that AIDS is not a single phenomenon, a repetition of the same, but a multiplicity whose identity is, at best, illusory. Following that I will argue that we must turn our attention to the senses of these events in order to adequately confront them.

 

My concern here is with the scientific, economic, political and social hegemony of the HIV model of AIDS and the correlative emphasis on the search for a cure/vaccine to the detriment of social measures designed to control the spread of the disease. Since 1984 it has been taken as a fact that HIV is the necessary and sufficient cause of AIDS.²⁵ I say “taken as a fact” not because there are no qualified dissenters from this view but because HIV has become the dominant model in the four registers listed at the beginning of this paragraph to the exclusion of all other possibilities. HIV may well be the sole cause of AIDS (and if we are lucky we will eventually find out whether or not this is the case) but the troubling aspect is that other avenues of research and treatment (not to mention prevention) have been effectively marginalized. Given the stakes, to say “troubling” is to say the least.

 

The dominance of this model is due to a number of reasons both within and outside the domain of what we nominally call science. “Science” is taken to be that language which accurately represents the world in a universalized system of signification in which signs refer to independent objects and the system of their relations to one another. It appears as an empirical endeavor in which the facts of the matter provide their own conceptual structure by means of revelation to sufficiently rigorous and insightful researchers. While this image has been criticized by a number of authors (e.g., Paul Feyerabend, Foucault, Thomas Kuhn) it remains the dominant model socially, politically, economically and scientifically (by this last I mean that scientists themselves largely retain this image of their work). With regard to AIDS the point is that scientific propositions that identify HIV as the cause of AIDS appear to establish a universal and uncontestable reference free of significant effects of the sense of those propositions, the mode of presentation of those propositions and the mode of presentation of the theories and observations which generate those propositions.

 

But if Deleuze is right, the always unexpressed sense of these propositions, theories, observations and the multiplicity of correlative and contiguous propositions, what Foucault calls a discursive formation, functions as their ground, as the virtuality from which they are actualized. Let me now turn to what I take that sense or senses, at least in part, to be.

 

As Donna Haraway has shown, immune system discourse, and correlatively, disease discourse, are structured around the concept of identity and individuality where the primary task of the immune system is the differential identification of Self and Non-self and the defense of the (self-same) individual against foreign intruders.²⁶ Political/military metaphors are not misplaced here as they permeate immune system discourse as they have done the discourse of both disease and the body for at least the last two centuries. On the one hand, epidemics such the one of cholera in Paris in the 1830’s were perceived as foreign invasions (and continue to be: syphilis sent back in the blood of soldiers returning from foreign wars, AIDS is the invasion of the heterosexual community by the gay or drug abusing communities).²⁷ On the other hand, the body’s cells were described as closed, individual organisms with their own borders and identity at both the advent of cellular theory and well into this century.²⁸ The sense of both immune system and disease discourse adheres to the surface of the propositions that deploy the terms Self, Non-self, individual, identity, border, attack, defense.

 

Moreover, the shift from vitalism/mechanism models of life to the information system model of DNA has not produced any fundamental change in the political/military sense of medicine and biology. All that has changed is the conception of the attack/defense structures. With the development of genetic models of heredity and the advent of DNA, the body (and all other forms of life) becomes the phenotypical expression of a genotype, a code, carried in the recesses of the cells that constitute it. Disease becomes a battle between information systems, those of the body and of the disease organism with a third system, that of medicine, intervening on the side of the body. This sense of disease becomes particularly apparent in both AIDS and auto-immune diseases (e.g., multiple sclerosis, lupus erythematosus). Part of the genetic code is the program for the development of defense mechanisms, the immune system, but precisely because it is a program it carries the possibility of errors occurring both within the code itself and in its translation. Auto-immune diseases (which can be either congenital defects in the code or defects produced by infectious agents or a combination of the two in which a pathogen activates a dormant gene) are caused by “errors” in the code that turn the body against itself in a physiological death drive. In this context HIV appears as an alien infiltrator that invades the body’s most fundamental structure and perverts the code that produces and maintains its identity. If auto-immune diseases are evidence of traitors within the body then HIV appears as a subversive foreign agent that recruits and produces traitors. And it appears as such precisely because of the way the sense/event of medicine and disease has been actualized.

 

Modern medicine is constituted largely as a discipline of intervention that confronts disease as an entity to be combatted and defeated. For the most part even preventative measures are simply efforts to identify disease at an early stage in order to initiate a counter-attack before a beachhead is secured. This is due both to the dominance of the germ model of disease, disease as an invader, and to the institutional reorganization of medicine that Foucault has dubbed the “birth of the clinic.” The clinic or hospital is where the body is placed in a position of hyper-individuation as it is removed from its socio-environmental context in favor of a controlled, universally reproducible setting in which the environment has no effect on the disease process other than those intentionally produced by medical intervention (in the ideal scenario²⁹) in order to isolate the disease process from all the other processes in which the body is enmeshed. The clinic enjoys a privileged position in the medical community; it is the site of teaching, the site of research, the site with the highest concentration of technology and new treatment modalities, the site where those on the cutting edge of the profession want to be. As such, it becomes the standard, the norm, for the practice of medicine, the treatment of disease.

 

The production of the ideal, neutral setting in which to isolate and treat diseases and the diseased has as its correlate the construction of the ideal, neutral social environment. The structure of medicine as interventional and the correlative invention of the neutral site for the study and treatment of disease constitutes the body’s environment, insofar as it is of medical interest, as either neutral or threatening. Either the environment acts as a factor or co-factor in the production of disease or it remains neutral. That is to say that social environments only appear as potentially invasive, as alien, to the body insofar as they appear at all as a factor in the generation or transmission of disease. In the social, political and economic structures of the western world the neutral environment (outside the clinic) is the white, bourgeois, suburban and rural domain of monogamous heterosexuals.

 

Lastly, we may note the long genealogy that has linked sex and sexuality to pathology. As Foucault has ably shown, sex and sexuality have been constituted as harboring within them an always present pathological element that can manifest itself along moral, psychological, and physiological lines in the individual generating a danger to both the individual and the species.³⁰ Sex is an autochthonous danger to the defense of the Self precisely because it is a drive within oneself (one’s Self) that violates the defensive borders of the Self by exposing the body to an Other, to a Non-self that harbors a potential invader. Sexuality is always, at least potentially, a double agent opening the back door of the citadel and admitting foreign insurgents.

 

These are some of the senses into which the disease we now call AIDS irrupted. The sense/event of AIDS mingles and interacts with the sense/events of medicine, biology, the immune system, sexuality and the environment in the in-between. It is here that it becomes, as Avital Ronnell has said, an historical event rather than a natural calamity.³¹ As an historical event it is caught up in the genealogy of these other sense/events that allows its propositional determination not only as a viral infection that disrupts the functioning of the immune system but also as an alien invader (whether it be from the “dark continent” or from the [gay and/or promiscuous] “aliens” among us), as moral retribution for abominations of nature, as divine retribution for the same, as “nature’s way of cleaning house,” etc.³² The construction of AIDS as an essentially gay disease (and hence one that affects those undeserving of “our” full social, political, economic and scientific intervention in the cause of eliminating “their” suffering) is not simply the result of imaginations fueled by ressentiment (although this element cannot and must not be ignored). It is a complex of propositions whose ground lies in the realm of sense/events. That is, all of the actualizations of all of the sense/events, all of the propositional meanings that arise from the sense/events, outlined above enter in to the constitution of AIDS as a “gay” disease. Moreover, the search for a singular and self-same cause of the disease elicits the construction of a singular and self-same “alien” presence that imports the disease into “our” midst — despite however illusory both of those identities are.

 

But this ground in sense/events does not have the relation of resemblance to its current manifestation as the possible does to the real. It is a virtuality, or series of virtuals, from which one line of actualization has been realized. The sense/event(s), along with the mixture of sense/events in which it is immersed, is not determinative of any particular line of actualization in the strong sense. Sense/event as ground of both sense and nonsense, truth functional statements and the absurd, is the ground of multiple avenues of meaning; it does not fix meaning, it enables it (that is, it enables both its fixation and the perversion of that fixation).

 

At this point, let me return to the question of the dominance of the HIV model of AIDS. Despite the fact that prominent researchers, Robert Root-Bernstein and Peter Duesberg among others, have provided significant evidence and coherent arguments that HIV is not a sufficient, and may not be a necessary, cause of AIDS there has been little research done along the lines that they suggest.³³ Indeed, those who have dared to publicly argue along these lines have had their research funds cut off. The reasons for this are multifold. Economically, the HIV model has generated enormous income for the manufacturers of HIV tests and antiviral drugs. Politically, it has allowed governments to claim that they are acting responsibly and to assure a frightened populace that the cause has been found with the concomitant implication that the risk has been decreased, that the scientific will to knowledge continues to have the power to protect them. Socially, it has strengthened the identification of the threat with body fluids of those already marginalized and feared and furthered their exclusion in the interests of the safety of the “general population.” Its hegemony lies in its positing of a singular and identifiable Non-self that functions as an invader and internal insurgent as opposed to multiple-antigen models that propose complex interactions in which no single, and thus identifiable, enemy is present.

 

To be sure, AIDS research is not entirely monolithic — if it were, neither Roots-Bernstein’s nor Duesberg’s work would be known or published. Nonetheless, such research is marginalized to the extent that the social-political-economic actualization of AIDS has effectively fixed HIV as the necessary and efficient cause. And this actualization functions in a spiral manner insofar as our social, political and economic capital is invested in scientific research on HIV which then provides support for the continuing reinvestment of capital.

 

Moreover, the hegemony of the HIV model focuses the direction of research toward the discovery of a magic bullet, a cure or vaccine that will overthrow the disease and render it harmless. Because the social environment is presented as either neutral or hostile it appears as something to be defeated instead of a milieu that can be transformed. And as the environment of AIDS has been actualized as sexual in nature, sex becomes an enemy to be defeated either through abstinence or its imprisonment within the legitimized perimeter of monogamous heterosexuality. This mode of presentation has functioned to the detriment of social measures designed to control the spread of the disease by lowering a cone of silence over the discourse of safer sex and IV drug use.

 

That is to say that the fixation of one line of actualization, the one that runs through HIV, has established this retrovirus as a functional referent for both the popular imagination and the economically and politically legitimized scientific/medical community. It establishes a single meaning of the disease, single direction for research, a single perception of the infected and diseased. And it does so because it is both good sense and common sense, a means of foreseeing the future (hopefully) and a means of identifying the threat. It stabilizes and freezes the event, shifting us from the uncertainty of becoming of the event to the safety of the being of the referent.

 

Following this it seems to me that there are two ways of thinking about how we can respond to the sense/event. On the one hand, we have the project of counter-actualization.³⁴ By making the sense of the event explicit we return to the virtuality of the sense/event, to the series of virtual singularities that make up the sense/event, in an attempt to allow the formation of new lines of actualization, the formation of new structures of propositional meaning, new designations, manifestations, significations and referents. The sense/event is repeated but as a repetition of difference in place of the repetition of the same. On the other hand, the mobilization of virtual singularities holds open the possibility of transformations at the level of the sense/event itself, at the level of the interactions of the various sense/events that underlie, overlap, and interconnect with the sense/event of AIDS. These two operations are not fundamentally distinct in any manner. Instead, they are two ways of thinking about the mining of sense and the effects it might produce.

 

To return to the sense/event of AIDS, to the realm of the in-between, is to re-eventualize sense and the event, to set them moving again, to find in its becoming the multiplicity of other possibilities, of other lines of actualization, to other lines of research, to the possibility that AIDS is not the unitary and univocal disease that it is presently constructed as. The means to do so is by taking care of the sense, by mining the realm of sense/events in order to make its sense explicit, by remaining suspicious of the senses we presuppose in making sense of that sense. To do so is to produce, hopefully, shifts in the sense of AIDS, shifts in the mode of presentation of AIDS, shifts in the direction of AIDS and shifts in the meaning of AIDS.

 

Our project, then, is one of counter-actualization, undoing the lines of actualization in order to re-eventualize the virtual elements of the sense/events. The problem that appears to arise at this point is that of how we are to prevent other noxious lines of actualization, new lines that continue to increase suffering rather than decrease it. But this is a false problem or, more accurately, a bad formulation of the problem that supposes that we have control over the lines of actualization or over sense/events, that our causal interactions are more than quasi-causes whose effects we have the good sense to predict and the common sense to identify and control. But it is precisely the case, as Foucault has shown us so well, that this is the sort of control, the sort of power/knowledge, that we do not have. The best we can do is to pervert the actualizations that we find and wait to see what is actualized in the wake. The tactics and strategies of counter-actualization, of the mining of sense, are those of the nomad, the guerilla fighter, the terrorist. Counter-actualization is a street fight that attacks sedentary blockages and obstacles in order to set things moving again and then waits (im)patiently for new sedimentations, new blockages, new obstacles, new struggles.³⁵

 

We cannot simply take care of the sense and allow the words to take care of themselves. The Duchess is wrong there. Indeed, taking care of the words is a part of taking care of the sense. And if we do not take care of the sense, the words will surely take care of us.

 

Notes

 

I wish to extend my thanks to Constantin V. Boundas for his comments on an earlier version of this paper. My thanks also to Lisa Brawley of Postmodern Culture and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

 

1. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass (New York: Bantam Books, 1981) 68.

 

2. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, (New York: Columbia UP, 1990). Hereafter cited in the text as LS.

 

3. This is, of course, too simplistic. But I leave aside here the reflexive issues of meanings that are about thought, language, meaning itself, etc.

 

4. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1975) xi. See also The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970): the original title of this work is Les mots et les choses.

 

5. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy Through the Looking Glass (La Salle: Open Court, 1985) 92.

 

6. Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Meaning,” trans. Max Black, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. Peter Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982) 56-78, hereafter cited in the text as SR. There is some debate over whether to translate the term “Bedeutung” (as Frege uses it) as “meaning” or “reference.” Following J.N. Mohanty’s practice I shall use “reference” at those places where I do not use both terms. See Husserl and Frege (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982) 43-4.

 

7. Michel Foucault, introduction, The Normal and the Pathological, by Georges Canguilhem, trans. Carolyn Fawcett, (New York: Zone Books, 1989) 8; cf. Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977) 175-6. Nor is the philosophy of sense a philosophy of the concept for Deleuze, but of the conditions in which concepts appear.

 

8. We may note here that, on Frege’s terms, denotation and signification fall under the heading of reference while manifestation is a form of sense.

 

9. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, (New York: Oxford UP, 1977) 58-66. The relation in which the denotation of a pure this breaks down nearly immediately into an dialectic between the I and the this-now-here. See Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) for reasons why Deleuze would ignore Hegel at this point.

 

10. Philip Goodchild offers a lucid description of this problem in “Speech and Silence in the Mumonkan: An Examination of the Use of Language in the Light of the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze,” Philosophy East and West 43.1 (1993): 1-18.

 

11. Lecercle argues that the positive definition of sense is that of a paradoxical element that links the series of signifiers and the series of signifieds, always in excess in the first and lacking in the second. See Lecercle, 101-2, cf. LS 48-51. AIDS is always excessive in the series of signifiers that are deployed around it (see note to Paula Treichler below) and remains lacking in a number of ways as a signified.

 

12. This creates what in Platonic scholarship is known as the third man problem. One might argue that despite this sense could still be defined. However, I take Deleuze to argue that sense is an aleatory function that cannot be captured in any proposition precisely because it cannot be contained within language.

 

13. See Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, in particular Part 3 in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1980), 12-7.

 

14. Carroll, Looking Glass 117.

 

15. Cf. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 64, on non-being. Nonsense, on this view, is not the negation or absence of sense but sense as a problematic.

 

16. One might well wonder at this point what nonsense has to do with the event of AIDS, particularly with the scientific and medical aspects of the disease. What the history of science shows us is that propositions that had denotations or significations (or referents) in the past (under previous paradigms or in previous discursive formations) no longer have those referents. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, propositions that currently have referents did not have them in the past. Foucault points out that Gregor Mendel’s statements regarding hereditary traits were not truth-functional in 19th century biology (“Discourse on Language,” The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith [New York: Pantheon Books, 1972] 224). They were taken to be absurd or nonsense and in the context of the dominant scientific theories of the day they were just that, even though they are presently not only truth functional but, to a certain extent, true. My point is that sense and nonsense function at a level prior to what Foucault would describe as the underlying order that structures an episteme. This is why I have not referred to Foucault’s discussion of the in-between in The Order of Things, xx-xxi.

 

17. Michel de Certeau, “History: Science and Fiction,” Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986) 205.

 

18. Foucault 173-4.

 

19. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 154.

 

20. Lecercle 98.

 

21. Georges Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist, ed. Francois Delaporte, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Zone Books, 1994) 164. Italics in the original.

 

22. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988). Hereafter cited in the text as B.

 

23. John Rajchman, Philosophical Events (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 160.

 

24. Cf. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 153.

 

25. Mirko Grmek, History of AIDS, trans. Russell Maulitz and Jacalyn Duffin (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990) 68.

 

26. Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of the Self in Immune System Discourse,” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) 203-30.

 

27. See Francois Delaporte, Disease and Civilization, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986); and Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Anchor Books, 1990).

 

28. Canguilhem 168.

 

29. This is of course an ideal as there are always nosocomial infections, to name but one unintended effect.

 

30. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, (New York: Vintage Books, 1980).

 

31. Avital Ronnell, “A Note on the Future of Man’s Custodianship (AIDS Update),” Public⁸ (Toronto: Public Access, 1993) 56.

 

32. See Paula Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Criticism(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989) 31-70, for a discussion of the multiplicity of meanings that have been generated around AIDS.

 

33. See Robert Root Bernstein, Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus (New York: The Free Press, 1993). Let me note here that there are serious problems with the sense of Root-Bernstein’s own argument which tends to portray certain sexual activities as inherently dangerous. Nevertheless, the multiple-antigen-mediated-autoimmunity (MAMA) model answers a number of questions that HIV model does not, in particular why some individuals have been infected with HIV for over ten years without developing AIDS or any symptoms thereof.

 

34. I take this term from Constantin Boundas.

 

35. One of the most remarkable examples of this sort of activity is the activity of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). See Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston, AIDS DemoGraphics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990).