“God has No Allergies”: Immanent Ethics and the Simulacra of the Immune System
| September 22, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 06, Number 2, January 1996 |
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Adrian Mackenzie
Sydney University
adrian.mackenzie@philosophy.su.edu.au
“[T]he science of life always accommodates
Conventional approaches to bioethics long for a purified set of principles in order to guide the application of scientific knowledges of the body — the life sciences — to individual “cases.” In the realm of bioethics, the possibility that these knowledges might themselves constitute entities such as the individual, or the possibility that the individual body might itself be something other than the more or less governable a-historical object of technoscientific action, awakens a kind of horror autotoxicus. Nor do the prevalent modes of ethical discourse react kindly to the possibility that the “living” body of an individual is also a self, an actor within a complicated set of narratives, codes and apparatuses whose various registers — medical, economic, racial, sexual, religious, and so on — intersect. In short, conventional bioethical discourses refuse to acknowledge that, as Emmanual Levinas has written, “the body is a permanent contestation of the prerogative attributed to consciousness of `giving meaning’ to each thing; it lives as this contestation.”2
Traditional bioethics disappoints us insofar as it overlooks the ways the body contests the prerogatives of consciousness, contests reason and self-identity. Instead of opening onto the possibility of divergent ethea, bioethics’ universalizing adjudicative principles legitimate the biomedical normalization of differences by trying to deal only with the moral rights of the rational self and by leaving the differing character of embodiment — a most profound aspect of the ethical habitat — aside. In its separation of scientific theory and “ethical” practice, and in its unwillingness to transit any borders into the epistemological territory of science, conventional bioethics misapprehends the active and ambivalent role of technoscientific intervention, an intervention which both produces these crucial differences in embodiment and participates in their effacement. Traditional bioethics allergically responds to the ethical issue — the maintenance of ethos, of embodied differences, of the character and habits of individual bodies.
Bios: nomó
"Now it is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion."3
Foucault’s well-known description of a shift during the last two centuries from sovereign to disciplinary power or “bio-power” implies a displacement in the substance of ethics.4 In diverse discourses and domains, it becomes increasingly obvious that the presumed exclusion of ethics from the theoretical-pragmatic complex of science itself, from the very concrete operations and forces of technoscientific discourses engaging living bodies, significantly limits the relevance and effectiveness of the traditional notion of ethics.5
As Donna Haraway describes it, “the power of biomedical language . . . for shaping the unequal experience of sickness and death for millions is a social fact deriving from on-going heterogeneous social processes.” 6 The morality-displacing power of biomedical discourse and practice does not confine itself to sickness and death, but branches out into the normalization of whole populations. At many different scales and under different aspects — birth, death, sexual relations, work, fitness, stress, leisure, and so on — life is targeted by the vectors of biomedical intervention.
Again, Foucault makes this point succinctly when he writes of the emergence of bio-power: “For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time; amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention.”7 The propagation of bio-power — designating “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculation and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life”8 — powerfully challenges any responsive ethics to address the realm of physiology and to reframe the ethical substance to include the embodiment of biomedical materiality. In other words, so-called “physiological” or “biological” questions increasingly raise ethical issues in ways that cannot be disentangled from the historical conditions of life as a locus of power relations or, conversely, solved through an a-historical ethico-moral calculus. Under the auspices of bio-power, biological knowledge increasingly presents itself as the ground of self-realization and governance in relation to life in general. It is difficult to suggest a more obvious example of the explicitly biomedical complications of ethics than the response to HIV/AIDS over the last decade: the rhetorics of defence and exclusion comprehensively blur the borders between scientific representations of disease and the institutional and “ethical” responses.
In the course of this translation, which constitutes biology as an object of power, a concomitant conceptual and representational shift has occurred in biological understandings of the body. “The body,” as the object of biomedical discourse, no longer displays the hierarchical unity of organs and structures which projected it as subject to the rational self, master of its own self-reflexive truth, the presupposed self of traditional ethical codes. In a shift that correlates with the shift from sovereign power centered on the speaking, judicative subject to the statistical, dispersed technological networks of disciplinary power, the living body can no longer be thought of as the “unambiguous locus of identity, agency, labour,” as Haraway stresses in her reading of the immune system as “icon.” Rather, the living body is symbolized and operated on as “a coded text, organized as an engineered communications system.”9 From the standpoint of bio-power, it is difficult to decide where, if not everywhere in the corpus of life, difference and identity reside. Certainly it no longer gravitates towards the constellation of reason as consciousness of self.
Hence two inter-related problems are at hand: (i) the need to dislocate the locus of ethical concern so that it is not simply excluded from the discourses of science, or confined to the instrumental regulation of their application; (ii) the issue of how to formulate such a relocated ethics when the new locus of embodiment turns out to lack stability because it “emerges as a highly mobile field of strategic differences.”10 Together they suggest that an ethics of embodiment must concern itself with the attempts of biomedical discourses exhaustively to code differences. Such an ethics calls for an account of the irreducibility of individual differences that goes outside the traditional assumption of independent selves standing in the solitary light of reason, illuminated by transcendent interior values. At the same time, if we seek differences conducive to heterogenous ethea in the face of ever-extending processes of bio-political normalization, we cannot rule out the possibility that strategic zones of difference reside within science itself.
Immunity and alterity
In the context of immunology the major stake is indeed the irreducible difference and self-identity of individuals. A contemporary textbook of immunology asseverates:
The central question in immunology has always been, How can the immune system discriminate between “foreign” and “self.”11
Immunology proffers itself as the science of bodily self and non-self recognition. Varela and Anspach write: “[W]hat is the nature of the body identity when a syndrome such as AIDS can cause its breakdown? This leads us directly to the key phenomenon of body identity: the immune system.”12 Haraway also cites a number of reasons why the study of the immune system stands out as an exemplary and strategic site in the biomedical coding of differences. First, immunological discourse increasingly tries to determine who or what counts as the “general population.”13 The diagnosis of HIV-AIDS has, for instance, created a new population group with different legal, insurance and employment status to the general population. In a more direct negotiation of differences, immunology now supplies anthropological field study with the means to conclusively determine ethnic groupings.14 As an already fertile field of biotechnological activity, the practical importance of immunology continually grows as the technology of monoclonal antibodies infiltrates diverse industrial, diagnostic and agricultural practices.
Secondly, Haraway proposes that the immune system be viewed as representative of the denaturing processes mentioned above which have translated the body into an explicitly decentered and dynamically structured object. She writes: “My thesis is that the immune system is an elaborate icon for the principal systems of symbolic and material `difference’ in late capitalism.”15 The use of the word “system” is not incidental in this context because one of Haraway’s main concerns is to show how biomedical representations of bodies now resort to the conceptualities of signal and logic derived from communication “systems.”16 Immunology, according to Haraway, is one of the principal actors in the re-staging of the body as a biotechnological communications system.
The corporeal negotiations of material differences carried by the immune system intimately determine what is properly one’s own body; they regulate a body open to and capable of responding to an indefinite variety of “others” — living, non-living, or on the borderline between the living and the dead (e.g. viruses). Thus we can identify a particularly apt biomedical figuration of “ethical” interest in the immunological figuration of the self, where “practically all molecules in the universe are antigens,” 17 that is to say, where almost any kind of matter potentially elicits an immune system response, and where there is no simple borderline between what is foreign and what is recognized as belonging, no simple dividing line between between drug and toxin, nourishment and parasite.
The triumph of an icon of the self: the self as icon
How can the promise of an ethics which does not place itself beyond the material effects of a biomedical discourse such as immunology be fulfilled? In what mode would ethics permeate the supposedly value-resistant fabric of the science of immunology? By dwelling less obsessively on values and orienting itself more towards an ethics understood as “a typology of immanent modes of existence.”18 The natural properties of bodies are steadily being diversified and complicated by immunologically sophisticated organ transplants, prosthetics, pharmaceuticals, by practices of corporeal grafting and by all the inflorescences of matter to which the flesh is currently heir. If it wishes to account for the specificities of ethea — the dwelling places of living things — for the character, habits and habitat of localized bodies, ethics must begin to register the contours of difficult terrains such as the immune system on a map of embodied difference.
In part, as I have said, ethics must show how biomedical discourses such as immunology actively produce rather than merely describe differences. Can the biomedical sciences be shown always to be doing more than describing the origin of bodily differences? Can they also be seen as actively elaborating differences? If they can, we may assume that immunology not only describes how the immune system differentiates and secures self from other, but that immunology, in constituting a self immunized against others, also performs an ethically charged immunizing operation. (Certainly an obsession with severing obligation or connection to others runs strongly through the isolating treatment accorded to people infected with HIV-AIDS.) Counter to Haraway’s thesis that the immune system is an icon of symbolic and material differences, immunology could be read as a discourse of immunity which attempts, as the Latin root immunis suggests, to free or exempt the self from obligation to others.
Immunology, like nearly every science, does indeed present itself as “merely representing” rather than actively producing differences between self and non-self within the contemporary social field. In this sense it remains, along with most other sciences, Platonist. But unlike many other sciences, immunology explicitly allies itself with Platonism — the Western tradition’s most persistent and wide-ranging discourse on representation and the judgment of representation — in its foundational paradigm, the Principle of Clonal Selection. Because this foundation is no longer even questioned by immunology it is not, as Golub’s textbook points out, referred to as clonal selection theory but merely as Clonal Selection.19 Experiments do not test this foundation; they only test hypotheses consistent with it. Clonal Selection purports to explain how the body’s immune system is able to discriminate and respond to “foreign” material (antigen):
Antigen does not instruct the immune system in what specificity to generate; rather, it selects those cells displaying a receptor of the appropriate specificity and induces them to proliferate and differentiate, resulting in expansion of specific clones of reactive cells.20
The “founding father” of this theory, Niels Jerne, conveyed Clonal Selection in the following terms:
Can the truth (the capacity to synthesise antibody) be learned? If so, it must be assumed not to pre-exist; to be learned it must be acquired. We are thus confronted with the difficulty to which Socrates calls attention in Meno (Socrates, 375 B.C.), namely that it makes as little sense to search for what one does not know as to search for what one knows; what one knows one cannot search for, since one knows it already, and what one does not know one cannot search for since one does not even know what to search for. Socrates resolves this difficulty by postulating that learning is nothing but recollection. The truth (the capability to synthesise an antibody) cannot be brought in, but was already inherent.21
Can this overlapping of the Clonal Selection theory and the Platonic theory of knowledge as a recollection which needs nothing from the outside and which is exempt (immune) from obligation to the unknown be regarded as anything more than a fascinating but purely rhetorical invocation of a philosophical text as metaphor? Yes, if it can be shown that the Platonic investment descends beyond the play of `mere rhetoric’ into the deep structure of immunological theory, or, more significantly, that the rhetoricity of this Platonic explanation of the possibility of an immunological self could not be completely expelled from the body of immunological theory.
A logic of decontamination
In “Plato and the Simulacrum,” Gilles Deleuze claims that the founding motive of Platonism has always been the effort to secure the domain of representation on a model of Sameness. The dialectic and myths of Plato’s texts are read by Deleuze as providing a founding model for distinguishing and selecting proper claimants from false claimants. Proper claimants are copies which have some claim to truth, knowledge and the Good because of their internal resemblance to the Idea on which they are modelled; false claimants constitute the simulacra whose apparent resemblance to truth and the Good conceals an “interiorized dissimilarity.”22 This founding model is thus designated as the model of Sameness. Only representations or copies that have an internal relation to the essential Idea of the Good, beauty, or virtue possess the authentic resemblance or Likeness which delineates the domain of philosophical representation. I will return to the issue of the simulacra and the false claimants to be excluded because of the absence of any proper relation to the Same. But first, I would roughly contextualize Jerne’s fortuitous encapsulation of the foundation of immunology in Platonic terms within the broader framework of Platonism.
Varela and Anspach are explicit: “Formulated another way, the organism learns to distinguish between self and nonself during ontogeny”.23 The idea of knowledge as recollection of the differences inscribed earlier (during embryogenesis) is understood as the immunological parallel to the immortality of the soul which Plato consistently introduces into his texts under the guise of a myth. These myths claim that only because the soul (and by analogy, the immune system), prior to its current embodiment (that is, during embryogenesis), has contemplated the eternal Forms or Ideas beyond the mundane world, can knowledge approximate in recollection the Truth which the soul has seen (that is, one’s body can recognise what belongs to it and what is other). While the myths of the Phaedrus, Symposium, Republic, Statesman and Meno which present the eternal life of the soul might all be regarded as interruptions or digressions in the course of the dialectic, Deleuze argues that the ironic play at evasion (the myths are always explicitly advertized as heuristic fictions by Socrates) only conceals the deeper motive of methodically dividing the faithful claimant from the false claimant in order to protect a line of succession from Same to Like. “The myth, with its constantly circular structure, [i.e. souls circulating between mundane and extra-mundane life, contemplating the Forms in eternity] is really the narrative of foundation.” 24 It permits the claims of representations to be founded by determining which claimants may share in that which the unsharable, imitated Idea possesses firsthand: eternal, unchanging Being. Without that share, claimants are nothing but those impostors known as simulacra.
The philosophical schema and principle of selection of Platonism — and hence of any knowledge system such as immunology which purports simply to describe or represent differences — can thus be formulated as “only that which is alike differs.” The Same always returns, insofar as it generates good copies, faithful imitations, paternally authorized by the logos of reason. It instates a hierarchy descending from the Same to Like, from being towards becoming. (Hence the hierarchy of copies of the bed — idea, artifact, painting — to be found in Book X of The Republic, 596b-602b.) The method of recognition and selection by division constitutes “an exact definition of the world as icon.” 25 This world-schema, within whose parameters science at least sometimes moves, does more than represent what is known. It actually selects or excludes various copies and representations on the grounds of their affiliation or non-affiliation to Sameness. The mundane world, a body, or an immune self is thereby selected and affirmed as an icon or good representation of that which it copies: the Same.
In this respect, Haraway’s ascription of iconic status to the “material-semiotic actor” of the immune system shares in the Platonism of the determinations of self she so cogently reads in the text of immunology. If the immune system is read as an icon of difference, it pictorially represents more or less truthfully an imitated referent which exists elsewhere. Read as icon, the immune system is condemned to remain within the hierarchical lineage of good or truthful claimants in the domain of mimetic representation.26 In its allegiances to Platonism, this is also the operation of the immune system as constituted by immunology in its fundamental problematic of self and non-self. The immune system, insofar as it is governed by Clonal Selection (and insofar as it can be represented in the very ideal of a system), is said to function in order to exclude anything whose claim cannot be traced through a lineage of recognizable likeness founded in the complex genetic locus known as the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC).27 The immunizing operation of immunology transpires through a theory that faithfully copies the Platonic operation of selecting among claimants, of bringing differences within a hierarchy of models and copies dominated by the model of the Same.
This way of looking at the immune system (and the world) has always cost dearly: it tends to preclude any relation with the outside other than the allergic. Indeed Derrida has argued that for Platonism in general, the
immortality and perfection of a living being would consist in its having no relation at all with any outside. That is the case with God (cf. Republic II, 381b-c). God has no allergies. Health and virtue . . . , which are often associated in speaking of the body, and analogously, of the soul (cf. Gorgias, 479b), always proceed from within.28
In conformity with Clonal Selection, immunological research privileges processes of selection that expel internal differences. Through an innumerable series of mouse-obliterating grafts, transplants, exchanges, extractions, and the patient isolation and exclusion of immunological diversity through selective breeding (for instance, the “nude mice,” lacking a thymus, often used in immunological work), immunologists have begun to map the complex molecular interactions of the immune system in terms of “marks” or coded traces. The guiding assumption: all the principal immune system cells involved in the immune response can recognize molecular markers on other cells, and these markers — MHC antigens — are elaborated by or refer back to genes in a certain region of the individual’s MHC gene complex. No proper immune response against antigens is to be expected unless all the participating cells display appropriate markers of self derived from the same genetic source. Indeed this attribute is now accepted as the operational basis of self in the immune system, although as Golub admits, “we do not now how non-reactivity to self is maintained.” 29 MHC restriction entails the Platonic provision that the immune system can only react to “foreign” by recollecting an older, interior “self,” ultimately sourced in genetic coding. Unless “foreign bodies” are accompanied by the markings of “self,” they will pass unnoticed. The immune system’s reaction to antigens is therefore not an absolute barrier against all comers, but a selective response: only those outsiders who can be marked as “foreign” by self-identical MHC markers will elicit a response. Like the soul who has gazed on the truth prior to the earthly phase of its cycle, immunology has argued that the system’s marking begins prior to the body’s nativity (during embryogenesis MHC markers are already starting to mark every cell in the body as self 30) and gradually accretes a memory of alterity through exposure to the infinite variety of antigens.
Difference within?
In the Platonic world, the domain of faithful representation is demarcated and defended by the methods of selection and exclusion which determine the legitimacy of the copy or the representation by either establishing its hierarchical position in relation to the model of the Same or excluding it from knowledge and reality altogether. Similarly the general orientation of immunology has been towards understanding the immune system as maintaining a defended bodily self, brought about through processes which recognized antigens related to the same MHC and dealt with foreign (allogenic) bodies marked as without an internal resemblance to the same by reacting defensively against them. This approach, carried out by the Platonic method of division and selection, is reproduced both in the inscriptive practices of immunology — the carefully controlled breeding of immunology’s laboratory mice essentially ensures that all offspring-copies are purged of hidden genetic differences — and in the theoretical formulation of the hierarchical mechanisms of cellular interaction in the immune system: the mnemic self of Clonal Selection. Clonal Selection in conjunction with MHC restriction distinguishes those claimants with proper internal resemblances from the diseased, pathogenic and purely factitious resemblances presented by antigens. A false claimant — a simulacrum — within the field of recognition of the immune system initiates the proliferation of good copies (antibodies in particular) which will expunge interiorized dissimilitude.
This Platonist commitment of immunology, although it permeates contemporary immunology and therefore needs to be taken into account, does not fully saturate it. Another dynamic is operative there, and it threatens the overthrow of Platonism. Deleuze expresses it directly as “only differences are alike.”31 Another possible reading of the immunological potentialities of the body can be linked to this other-than-Platonic rendering of the world. Jerne, who formulated the strongly Platonic motif of Clonal Selection which we have been following, also proposed a reading of the immune system that threatens the unity and telos of the system and the model of the Same it is employed to support. The network theory describes a regulation of immune response in which Clonal Selection would be undercut by the incessant reverberations of internal differences.
The theory specifies that all possible antigens of the outside world are able to be recognized by the immune system because they reverberate with interactions between elements internal to the immune system. Because every antibody within the system can interact with every other in a straightforward antigen-antibody reaction, i.e., every antibody can potentially mimic an antigen for some other antibody, the immune system will function through an unceasing cascade of internal responses. Of the roughly ten million or so different antibodies of the body (each antibody responds to a single specific type of antigen), “a vast number of responses are going on all the time, even in the absence of foreign antigen.”32 The equilibrium state of the immune system is a highly dynamic balance generated in a continual flux of differential relations. Antigens, ostensibly pathogenically entering the body from the outside world, are internally imaged by antibodies acting as defacto antigens. The immune system is capable of responding to the immense diversity of natural antigens because the part of the antigen (the epitope or antigenic determinant) internally imaged by an antibody acting as antigen (in this role, it becomes an idiotope) is shared by a relatively large number of epitopes. The confrontation with a foreign body takes place not in the mode of a defensive mobilization but in terms of a reverberation or resonance with some element of the system already sounding its own glissando of response. Varela and Anspach write:
[T]he immune system fundamentally does not (cannot) discriminate between self and nonself. The normal function of the network can only be perturbed or modulated by incoming antigens, responding only to what is similar to what is already present.33
An epitope would normally attract the response of a number of antibodies (an antibody acting as antibody in the network is called a paratope) because only part of it is imaged by a particular idiotope, and conversely, a specific paratope would most likely not be the only possible response to the epitope. A proliferating number of never fully equivalent paratopes respond to any particular epitope.34
In consequence, the humoral “self” maintained by the immune system in responding to foreign bodies would not be a matter of selection and exclusion according to criteria of internal relation to identity. Rather the identity of immune “self” would be produced as the effect of internal reverberations of disparate elements. The introduction of differences from the outside would thus effect nothing more than an amplification of certain reverberations already in play. As Haraway puts it:
In a sense, there could be no exterior antigen structure, no “invader” that the immune system had not already “seen” and mirrored internally.35
The difference in response between “foreign” and “self” would be measured by the degrees of this quantitative amplification. The network theory implies that the immune system includes within itself the angle or point of view from which differences and distinctions between self and others are made, rather than having division imposed from above by a principle of selection based on resemblance to a foundational identity. Thus, the immune response (insofar as it concerns the generation of antibodies) takes on that very same simulacral aspect which Platonism has always, according to Deleuze (and Derrida), sought to exclude:
In short, folded within the simulacrum there is the process of going mad, a process of limitlessness . . . a constant development, a gradual process of subversion of the depths, an adept avoidance of the equivalent, the limit, the Same, or the Like: always simultaneously more and less, but never equal.36
Interpreted as a simulacral entity, the immune system functions on the basis of internal disparities rather than on the basis of an internal likeness derived from a mnemic-genetic self. What immunology in its most explicitly Platonist inspiration regards as the recognition of external differences, can be understood as a sign that “flashes between two bordering levels, between two communicating series,”37 a prolongation of the on-going interaction that is the functioning of the network. Immunology’s admission that “it is possible for an individual to make a productive antibody response against its own idiotypic [i.e. uniquely marking the individual] determinants” 38 shows that (lymphocytically expressed) self-identity cannot be the ultimate foundation of the immune response against which all claimants, foreign or otherwise, are to be measured. Rather, the work of the simulacrum is a production of resemblances — between inside and outside, idiotopes and epitopes — through the resonance of divergent series. The effect of resemblance arises because the simulacrum (the sign generated between communicating series) “includes within itself the differential point of view.”39 These resemblances can no longer be selected on the basis of their hierarchical position in relation to the Same, because the system operates so as to render the notion of hierarchy between Same and Likeness infinitely reversible. There can be no order of model and successively degraded copies because everything — the resemblances, the relation between elements — begins in differences, in mobility, not in the sharing of an unsharable Same.
Exclusion and selection of difference
We ourselves wish to be our experiments and guinea pigs.40
How, in the pursuit of “resemblances” between Platonism and the dominant immunizing strain of immunology, between the overthrow of Platonism and a largely latent simulacral immunology, can biomedical ethics begin to assert the primacy of an ethical concern affirmed as embodiment or ethos?
The locus of ethical concern is ineluctably drawn into considering embodiment by virtue of the increasingly refined and comprehensive investments staged by bio-power around the management of living bodies. Immunology is likewise confronted by a disintegration of the underpinnings of its disciplinary object — the immune system considered as a mode of self-identity. In the case of immunology, any bioethics that recognized the constitutive effects of biomedical discourses and practices in producing the self would have to accommodate an equivocal production: the simultaneous naturalizing of bodies as a self modelled on interior Sameness and the denaturing of bodies across a mobile and contingent field of communicating but divergent series of differences. On the one hand, through the “myth” of a remembered exposure to identity (Clonal Selection) maintained by exclusion and division, immunology affirms Platonism and lays down the laws of an immune system belonging to a world bound by the hierarchy of Same and Like, defended against representations without the proper internal resemblance. On the other hand, the problem of the regulation of the immune system’s response produces an inversion of the principle of hierarchy, a mirroring confusion of borderlines between inside and outside and a corresponding complication of the lines between self and nonself. While the Platonic motif suggests an attempt to maintain a bodily order and integrity in the face of the chaos threatening from the outside, against the foreigners that might insinuate themselves, the anti-Platonic motif — read sympathetically — suggests the possibility of subverting the drive to master chaos by allowing resemblance and recognition only through internal dissimilitude, through the constantly decentered responses of divergent series.41
Aligning immunology to “whatever, in scientific practice, has always already begun to exceed the logocentric closure,”42 entails two principal but uncertain outcomes. First, the simulacral impulse in immunology uproots any single identifiable locus in which, finally and with certainty, the immune self could be located. In addition, the ethical substance of the immune self would, in the interplay of divergent series of mirrorings and reverberations between disparate elements placed in contact, appear as in experimental relation to alterity rather than as a conclusive ordering of likeness and divergence.
The primary characteristic of such an experimental orientation would be to augment the legions of nude mice and hybridomas currently employed by immunological laboratories with a version of the self able to affirm the complication within itself of heterogeneous series through real experience, whether this be of infection, disease, auto-immune reactions, allergies, grafts, transplants and so on. It is precisely the internal reverberation of divergent series that characterizes the simulacrum, and, I would argue, the simulacral processes of the network theory of immunity. In constantly generating a plethora of paratopes in response to the endless variety of idiotopes, the cascading activity of the immune system unravels any putative identity or unity of the embodied self. Reframing the deracinated bodies of contemporary biomedical discourse within an ethical anti-Platonism enables an immunological ethics that neither severs obligations to others (since its regulation would take the form of a “resonance” between differences that cannot be definitively divided according to interior Self and exterior Other) nor defends an immured self through a self-assertion that always regards differences as allergic.
The ethos of a self inhabited by interior differences would be more like the “window of vulnerability” that Haraway speaks of: a mode of dwelling in which boundaries between individuals are hard to fix (this is not to say there are no boundaries, only that they are complicated), in which inside and outside are traversed by a non-identical self generated in the scintillations and reverberations of divergent series. Immunology thus suggests that ethics need not begin and end in the privilege of an immune self.
Moreover, if this self inhabited by differences is to assert itself over the iconic self, it cannot maintain the immune system (contrary to Haraway’s reading) or any other systematization of living bodies as an icon of symbolic or material differences. Read as icon, any system, no matter how de-naturalized or differential in its operations, stands ready for re-incorporation in the world of representation, along with all the distinctions (model/copy, essence/appearance) and exclusions mobilized there. It is precisely this world, the world of representation, that the simulacrum calls into question by showing that the resemblance and identity which purportedly legitimize the icon are the outward effects of perhaps small internal differences. Not selection, but the simulation of resemblance and identity; not hierarchy, but the “condensation of coexistences.”43 Under these conditions, the ethos appropriate to the biopolitically-sensitive immune self would not seize on postmodern icons but would evaluate sameness as the always contingent resonances and harmonics of divergent series.
Notes
1. Jacuqes Derrida, “Autobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,” The Ear of the Other, trans. C. McDonald, ed. P. Kamuf (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988) 6.
2. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality & Infinity, trans. A. Lingis, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969) 129.
3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley, (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981) 138.
5. Two papers about bioethics strongly influence this discussion: Rosalyn Diprose, “A `Genethics’ that makes sense?” in R. Diprose & R. Ferrell, eds Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces, (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991); and Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System Discourse,” Differences, 1.1 (Winter, 1989).
11. Golub, Edward S., Immunology : A Synthesis (Sinauer Associates, 1987) 416.
12. Varela, Francisco and Mark Anspach “The Body Thinks: The Immune System in the Process of Somatic Individuation” in Materialities of Communication, trans. W. Whobrey, eds. H.U. Gumbrecht and K.L. Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994) 273.
18. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988) 23.
22. Gilles Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” October Winter 1983: 49.
27. “Each person has a group of genes, the major histocompatability complex or MHC, which codes for self-antigens.” See L. Sherwood, Human Physiology: From Cells to Systems (St Paul: West Publishing Company, 1989) 391. Self-antigens mark each one of a person’s cells, thereby allowing the recognition of cells as proper to the individual. A more technical explanation states: “MAJOR HISTOCOMPATIBILITY COMPLEX (MHC). Mammalian gene complex of several highly polymorphic linked loci encoding glycoproteins involved in many aspects of immunological recognition, both between lymphoid cells and between lymphocytes and antigen-presenting cells.” See The New Penguin Dictionary of Biology, 8th ed. (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990) 340. Also see, for an even more disconcertingly technical explanation: Golub chap. 17.
28. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 101-102.
29. Golub 481. For that matter, non-reactivity to self isn’t always maintained, as the multifarious auto-immune reactions show.
32. Niels Jerne, quoted by Golub 384. Haraway 22-23 provides a clear explanation of the network theory.
34. This diversity of possible responses to a given epitope is accentuated by the fact that “antibodies seem to recognize the three-dimensional configuration and charge distribution of an antigen rather than its chemical make-up as such.” The New Penguin Dictionary of Biology 33.
40. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974) S319.
41. On these different relations to chaos, and the connection they have with two different types of Eternal Return, the Platonic and Nietzschean, see Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum” 54-55.
42. Jacues Derrida, Positions, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 36.
Works Cited
- Deleuze, Gilles. “Plato and the Simulacrum.” October (Winter 1983): 43.
- —. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. trans. R. Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.
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