Allison Fraiberg

University of Washington
fraiberg@milton.u.washington.edu

 

We live in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. . . . today, there is a whole pornography of information.

 

–Jean Baudrillard

 

[T]here has been a mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject; we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace . . .

 

–Fredric Jameson

 

[W]e are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.

 

–Donna Haraway

 

Predominant in postmodern theories of representation are approaches and practices that locate “the body” within systematized networks and circuits. Theorists who are representative of very different theoretical positions–such as Jean Baudrillard, whose “ecstasy of communication” describes a breakdown between public and private, Fredric Jameson, whose “hyperspace” reflects a continuous sense of the present in a world of transnational capital, and Donna Haraway, whose “cyborg ontology” reads the disintegration of distinctions between organisms and machines–nonetheless concur in presenting scenarios in which traditional tropes of discreteness, of discretion, dissolve and the focus shifts to formulations of connectedness. Subjected to these discursive frameworks or grounding ontologies, the body, as a clearly delineated unit, blurs into negotiated relatedness and postmodern systematicity ushers in a contemporary meltdown of the discrete body. In other words, it would seem, at best, difficult to try to discuss “the body” with distinct boundaries, whereas referring to the bounded body– bounded to and within integrated networks–can emerge as a reflective postmodern image.

 

This networking of bodies has been prominent in the representations of and discourse about AIDS in the U.S. As I will show, mainstream media constructions of AIDS project and feed off a fear of, among other things, circuited sexuality. On the other hand, critics of mainstream AIDS representations work to break down the rhetorical constructions and effects of discrete categories, an obvious example being that of “general public” or “at risk groups.” In this paper, I will first resituate familiar discussions of the body in AIDS commentary, both popular and critical, by employing what Donna Haraway calls a “cyborg ontology.” I will then move on to suggest that, in terms of AIDS discourses, the body begins to resurface from within the networks defined, urging a very different kind of discreteness, and consequently a revised type of agency, into a postmodern context.

 

Wiring the Postmodern

 

When Baudrillard defines the “ecstasy of communication,” he grounds its images in screens and networks. Certain that “[s]omething has changed,” he laments the recognition of an “era of networks . . . contact, contiguity, feedback and generalized interface” (127). Communication, for Baudrillard, invokes a “relational decor,” a “fluidity,” “polyvalence” in “pure circulation” (130-31). Baudrillard anxiously describes these networks as “pornographic” and “obscene” since he sees in them the loss of the body and its familiar figurations: the “subject” and the always tenuous public/private dichotomy. Because of its fusing into the network, the body loses its discretionary status and, for Baudrillard, the “obscenity” lies in the dissolution of the private where “secrets, spaces and scenes [are] abolished in a single dimension of information” (131); Baudrillard’s “pornographic” develops out of the inability to produce “proper” limits and he invokes the schizophrenic for tropic legitimation:

 

with the immanent promiscuity of all these networks, with their continual connections, we are now in a new form of schizophrenia . . . too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore. . . . He can no longer produce the limits of his own being. . . . He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence. (132-33)

 

What is so remarkable about Baudrillard’s casting of the discussion in these terms is that, with the substitution of a noun or two, one could easily transpose this rhetoric into a “pro-family” position on AIDS that strains to keep the “halos” on, the “unclean” out, and the private crucially “protected.” In both scenarios there is a sense of inevitable fusion of the body within networks–a fusion realized, albeit reluctantly, by Baudrillard, but repeatedly denied and cast out on moral grounds by the so-called “pro- family” position on AIDS. Consequently:

 

The logical outcome of testing is a quarantine of those infected.

 

--Jesse Helms

 

Baudrillard’s mourning of the “loss” of past private spaces of the body is recast, with a similar tone, in Jameson’s analysis that isolates postmodernism within the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” Jameson reorganizes the postmodern schema into a “bewildering new world space of multinational capital” (58) with “effaced frontiers,” “integrated” commodity production, “intertextuality,” and the “disappearance of the individual subject.” What Jameson calls postmodern “hyperspace” is the global networking produced by transnational capital, a networking he sees as “transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively map its position” (83). Jameson arrives at the point of calling for ways to map this network and/by/for those “caught” within it, to make it epistemologically accessible, and finally, dialectically, make the best of what, he argues, had to come anyway.

 

Jameson differs from Baudrillard in, among other places, his isolation of a particular of a particular disjunction between subject and space. “My implication,” Jameson argues, “is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution…we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace” (80). Jameson does identify a new field of relations, but the subject he posits remains essentially the same, just a little lost in its new surroundings. For this reason, Jameson’s call for cognitive mappings resembles a type of postmodern finding of one’s self in a “bewildering” new field. This position, like Baudrillard’s, can find its correlative in AIDS discourse: the Jamesonian view would be reminiscent of the mainstream position that asserts the “general public” can contract HIV “as well.” In other words, the field has changed, but how the subjects are thought of within it remains virtually the same. Therefore:

 

I have asked the Department of Health and Human Services to determine as soon as possible the extent to which the AIDS virus has penetrated our society.

 

--Ronald Reagan (in 1987, when 25,644 were known dead)¹

 

For Haraway, however, both the field and the subject change as cyborgs provide the ontological myth that captures the image of post-industrial capitalist culture. She defines the cyborg as a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism” (“Manifesto” 174). Dissolving apparently clear distinctions propels the cyborg. “Needy for connection,” it lurks at the boundaries constructed and demanded by humanist thought, dismantling discretion in favor of interconnected networks and integrated systems. Boundaries “breached,” or at least “leaky,” include those between human and animal, between animal-human and machine, and between the physical and the non-physical. Like other postmodern strategies, cyborgs “subvert myriad organic wholes,” and, unlike Baudrillard and Jameson, Haraway can see potential in the loss of discretion: “So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (“Manifesto” 178). It is not the case that Haraway sees her cyborg myth as some post-organic deus ex machina; instead she invests her myth with perpetual tensions where “potent fusions” are balanced with “dangerous possibilities.” Focusing on the production and reading of integrated circuits and the relations within them, theorists can, then, in Haraway’s words, negotiate through various “system constraints” (“Biopolitics” 12-13).

 

Other theorists of postmodernism may argue and debate about whether to embrace or view with horror a cybernetic age; about whether the status of subjectivity has changed; about whether postmodernity signals a turn beyond that which was once valued (by some). Haraway, on the other hand, like many feminist cultural theorists, resists these debates about how one should feel in these times (paranoid, horrified, ecstatic) and instead tries to focus on what to do, how to proceed, and how to start thinking of pro-active strategies. (Granted, Jameson calls for cognitive mapping, but the energy seems reconciliatory rather than pro-active). Quite simply, what separates Haraway out from a substantial set of discourses about cybernetics is that she is not so much concerned with how good or bad a cybernetic age will be, or has become; she wants to talk about how the world is ontologically/epistemologically structured and what feminists can do about it.

 

Of Aids: Resituating Discourses

 

It is patriotic to have the AIDS test and be negative.

 

–Cory Servaas,
Presidential AIDS Commission

 

Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common needle users, and on the buttocks to protect the victimization of other homosexuals.

 

–William F. Buckley

 

AIDS is God’s judgment of a society that does not live by His rules.

 

–Jerry Falwell ²

 

So much of AIDS criticism has had to contend with cauterizing the effects of officially sanctioned positions such as those above; consequently, much of the work on AIDS to date has centered on exposing the assumptions and values embedded within mainstream representation. These important critiques focus predominantly on three, often intersecting, sites of construction. Often, representations of AIDS have problematically inherited historical and biomedical contexts, and various critics have discussed the problems when AIDS becomes another “venereal disease” or the latest version of rampant infectious disease where “contagion,” “quarantine,” and “contamination” become the dominant terms conditioning meaning (and often policy and research).³ Moreover, a large amount of critical practice has focused on exposing the racist, classist, sexist, and homophobic assumptions embedded in popular, medical, and sociological representations. Many of these undertakings highlight the politics behind discourses of “risk groups” that isolate people rather than practices; of the “general public,” which turns out to function more like an exclusive country club; and of “origins,” which, as Simon Watney argues, equates a source of something with its cause (“Missionary” 95).⁴ In addition, critics and activists have foregrounded organized/reorganized erotic economies and resisted the anti-sex and “pro-family” campaign engineered by hegemonic AIDS representations.⁵

 

These critical projects are crucial in that they expose the biases upon which policies are constructed. But what I would now like to do is think about some mainstream positions and some critical ones at the same time, in the same field of relations–in the field of what Haraway might call a cyborg-like network. Reorganized in this framework, attitudes range from denial of networking–in terms of the subject and/or the field–to a kind of hysterical reaction of recognition, to finally more productive readings and codings. Because I am trying to resituate these arguments on the same discursive field, the next few pages might be repetitive for those who are acquainted with the various critiques of mainstream AIDS commentary. Please bear in mind, however, that I am trying to re-view these positions as they relate to a cyborg-netic field; this resituating, while at times somewhat belaboured, is necessary ground out of which the resurfacing on the body emerges.

 

Denying Cyborgs

 

The cyborg notion of transgressed boundaries and leaky distinctions finds its immunological referent in the discourses of AIDS. The reality of HIV has opened up and relegated bodies to an integrated system of, among other things, sexuality. The bringing to consciousness of the presence of AIDS has broken down the traditional demarcations of the body, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside. For years now, with less safe practices, an interface propels the body to serve as an osmotic shell through which systematized sex circulates. Moreover, shared needles construct a network of IV drug users; and shared blood forces to consciousness a crucial interconnectedness. And, of course, these systems interpenetrate as networks of social relations emerge. The realities of AIDS dissolve the boundaries of the discrete body, and the cyborg, still needy for connection, integrates it into its discursive network. The New Right, mainstream media representation, and a lot of public sentiment have responded by denying cyborg-netic reorganizations of the body. Desperate to retain the traditional boundaries of the body as individual, both conservatives and liberals have articulated a rhetoric that has made several attempts to keep AIDS outside the sphere of the “general American public”–read white, heterosexual, middle-class nuclear family. In each situation, the position that denies recognition of a circuited body image tries to fabricate and maintain crucial distinctions between self and other.

 

The most obvious boundary that “official” conservative discourse clings to is the one between human and “disease”: “us” and “AIDS.” The strategic construction that urges keeping “it” out of “us” relies primarily on a projection since “it” would not be if it were not for “us.” Repressing that integration, the first rhetorical maneuver involves anthropomorphizing AIDS into a live virus and then militarizing its context. Susan Sontag notices that in this “high-tech warfare,” the AIDS virus [sic] “hides,” “attacks,” “lurks,” and, of course, “invades” (17-19). Similarly, Paula Treichler describes the rhetorical evolution of the “AIDS virus” as “a top-flight secret agent–a James Bond . . . armed with a ‘range of strategies’ and licensed to kill” insidiously invading the cell and “establishing a disinformation campaign” (59).

 

Reinforcing the “us/them” binary that denies the cyborg body is a continual search for a cause of AIDS, and consequently, the origins of HIV. Overdeterminations of HIV as the single agent cause of AIDS foreclose on posited co- factors; and then the quest for origin can shift to isolating sources of HIV. That a strain of virus remotely similar to HIV has been found in a species of monkey (the so-called “Green Monkey Hypothesis”) produces and perpetuates a popular contention that AIDS originated in “Africa.” Responsibility is projected onto a convenient other and the body of the “general American public” remains “safe” and isolated, establishing its boundaries not only by geography, but by implied race as well. Not only does this premise displace origins thousands of miles away, but in doing so relies on a familiar moral opposition of white and black. The “cause” of AIDS becomes the monolithic “dark continent,” the land of the primitive, and as Simon Watney notes, of “naked ‘animal’ blackness” (75). These multiple moral projections would enclose and protect white, middle- class, heterosexual America from invasion. Again, the nuclear family body denies the cybernetic organization of AIDS by refusing to recognize its integration within its networks.

 

Once discursively acknowledged, mainstream representations of AIDS draw on newly delineated boundaries; a revised “us/them” dichotomy emerges that keeps denying the AIDS-body cyborg. “Risk groups” or “those at risk” (revised from the “4-H” groups of the 80s) become the convenient other: most often cited as gay men and IV drug users (who are almost always represented as people of color). The nomenclature advocates that these are groups of people who are at high risk of contracting HIV, therefore the “general public” should stay away from “them.” The first striking characteristic of this configuration is that these are groups of people and if you find yourself fitting into one of these groups, you are necessarily at “high-risk.” This framework denies the subject any sort of agency, an ideologically motivated strategy that makes its point: the subject who falls into a high-risk group has no option but to occupy a position in it; at the same time, if one does not slip into one of these groups then there is, within this construction, no “risk.” Here, it doesn’t matter what you do because what counts is who you are; and for the person living with AIDS, this context leaves no room for subjectivity, for agency, for action.

 

That the intended audience of “risk group” identification is the “general public” underscores the contention that “those at risk” are precisely not part of that audience. The tenuous dichotomy, however, slips at several sites: that of what gets represented as the case of the “tragic” hemophiliac who contracts through blood products; the recipient of a transfusion of “tainted” blood; and the sex worker who “infects” the unknowing consumer. In each case, though, an innocence factor mitigates contraction. In a more recent attempt to reproduce the innocent body, and therefore maintain the ability to name guilt, the term “Pediatric AIDS” has become embedded in representations of certain people living with AIDS. In a move that seeks to reestablish boundaries to the now quite messy binary, “AIDS” and “Pediatric AIDS” have surfaced, rhetorically, as two very distinct constructs, each conditioning very different identities: babies born testing positive for HIV antibodies can occupy a position of “wholly innocent” while the mothers, depending on their backgrounds, await textual, moral assignation.

 

With the deconstruction effected, with the representational acknowledgement that AIDS indeed “leaks” into the “general public,” conservative thought reorganizes its “us/them” dichotomy into a rhetoric explicitly moral and “pro-family.” Each time the hint of connection emerges, a new denial of integration surfaces; each time a new illusory individual unit is posited. Prevention strategies that, at this point, still reject the implication of some bodies into the AIDS-body network consciously construct new boundaries around the body of the nuclear family. If the “innocent” general public can contract HIV as well, so the story goes, then a prevention campaign that extrapolates from occluded attitudes within risk-group discourse must center on a question of morality: if “we” can get AIDS (and this is precisely the moment when discursive productions can either accept the cyborg ontology or try yet again to deny it), then “we” must try to be good. The moralizing trope serves as the building material for the construction of boundaries. And “good” in the 1980s functions euphemistically to mean monogamous heterosexual relationships with people who “just say no” to drugs. The safest sex of all becomes abstinence–the illusory production of a self-contained body–and those who abstain from sex altogether become “very good” people; those who insist on having sex but do so only in monogamous relationships, preferably in marriage, are “good”; and, of course, those who engage in sex with many partners, who insist on being promiscuous, or use IV drugs, bring on infection “themselves.” In this configuration, a closed-off body equivocates into a pure body as the nuclear family forges boundaries embedded in morality.

 

Starting With Cyborgs

 

By stressing abstinence, by prescribing heterosexual monogamy, by condemning IV drug use, conservative discourse engages in a repressive hypothesis that promotes an economy of desire: the more you say yes, the higher your chances of “infection,” the more leaky the moral boundaries that surround you. The hierarchy of morality–abstinence, monogamy, condoms, etc.–has eroded, however, under the scrutiny of critics, many of whom recognize the flimsiness of the boundaries constructed. Douglas Crimp argues against abstinence as a strategy of prevention because “people do not abstain from sex, and if you only tell them ‘just say no,’ they will have unsafe sex” (252). Moreover, repressed in the call for monogamy is any reference to history: monogamy means little if one partner is HIV+ and the couple, thinking they have fulfilled the moral requirement in the symbolic contract that disqualifies them from contraction, practices unsafe sex. This education campaign denies a discursive field of indiscretion by promoting a rhetoric of the discreet individual.

 

Critics of media representations of AIDS have addressed this problematic by exposing its repressive mechanisms. John Greyson, for example, has produced a music-video exposing the “ADS” campaign–the “Acquired Dread of Sex” that one can get from watching, among other things, television (270). Consequently, Crimp notices how media campaigns to get people to use condoms have used fear as their manipulative device rather than sexuality. Ironically, he wonders why “an industry that has used sexual desire to sell everything from cars to detergents suddenly finds itself at a loss for how to sell a condom” (266). What culminates in an “acquired dread of sex” is the logical conclusion of a discourse that organizes repeated “us/them” oppositions to keep AIDS out, to deny a cyborg-netic field; and once AIDS manages to “infiltrate,” the emphasis shifts to deny its presence in the morally pure and displace it onto the deviant, thereby constructing new boundaries. It’s the repetition of a posture that attempts at any cost to deny connection/identification; it’s a constricted stance that tries desperately to repress indiscretion: a term defined more traditionally in the context of such denounced behaviors as sex and IV drug use, but also indiscretion described here as a certain dissolution of clear delineation. With indiscretion (both kinds) repressed, those remaining are left to close off their bodies, constricting any potential openings.

 

To speak of sexuality and the body, and not to speak of AIDS, would be, well, obscene.

 

--B. Ruby Rich

Simply put, those who enjoy getting fucked should not be made to feel stupid or irresponsible. Instead, they should be provided with the information necessary to make what they enjoy safe(r)! And that means the aggressive encouragement of condom use.

 

--Michael Callan

 

In contrast to conservative rhetoric that denies indiscretion, of any kind, one can locate an ontology that takes the breakdown of traditional boundaries associated with the body as a grounding premise. Since mainstream representation compulsively represses interconnectedness, resistant strategies can and do rupture the process, forcing the latent networks to percolate to consciousness, to representation. Rejecting the discursive displacements that produce Others at risk, it is a position that recognizes, like Rich, that the discourses of AIDS are in some sense always already within: “To speak of sexuality and the body and not to speak of AIDS, would be, well, obscene.” The texts that construct “AIDS” metaphorically become an ontological current running through bodies, making the connections of a systemic circuit. Distinctions, then, between self and other become archaic, and the AIDS-body cyborg functions as an icon that organizes perceptions and writings of the body.

 

Precisely because a notion of “risk group” or “those at risk” becomes problematic (which, granted, at this point does nothing to address the real inequities of representation), because the networks and narratives established by leaky boundaries integrate and implicate all and avoid projecting blame, the argument can shift from singling out risk groups to focusing on risk practices. The networks made manifest can then accommodate Watney’s call for an “erotics of protection” as well as Singer’s “body management”–both are organizations of erotic economies. If discussion of risk groups and the general public lead us to ask who we are when we have sex or use IV drugs, then the cyborg discursive configuration of risk practices asks all of us what we do when we have sex and use IV drugs. Unlike the former position that relegated the subject to helplessness within its constructions–an especially problematic space for a PLWA (Person Living With AIDS)–this field posits a subject, precisely because of its “indiscretion,” that can choose. Because this subject gives up its limit, its “halo,” (to invoke Baudrillard momentarily) of private protection, it gains agency for resistance–a key term for immunological reference.

 

And this subject can choose to have sex, unlike its anti-cyborg parallel, but must undergo what Linda Singer calls “changes in the economy of genital gestures and erotic choreography” (55). Whereas anti-cyborg bodies repressed sexualities when confronted with AIDS, integrated bodies adamantly guard the right to them. Carol Leigh, a sex worker and playwright, argues that “we must fight against all those who would use this crisis as an excuse to legislate or otherwise limit sexuality” (177). Those who have thought of sex as heterosexual penile penetration and ejaculation (many caught within the anti-cyborg “general public”) must reorganize perceptions in such a way as to eroticize non-genital areas; and when sex is genital, condoms and dental dams become new age sex toys. Embedded in all of these calls for safer practices are two assumptions that are crucial as far as my own argument is concerned: first, that the forged boundaries constitutive of the individualized units are amorphous; and second, that safer shooting and sex depend on a recogntion of interconnectedness, of indiscretion.

 

Resurfacing The Body

 

Rather than repressing sexuality, the AIDS-body network sublimates it, dispersing teleologically-oriented sex into more polymorphous activity. Within this revised organization, the rules of safe sex and calls for clean works dictate that, precisely because the boundaries are illusory, the body resurfaces as discrete entity. Condoms, dental dams, clean needles, and reserved blood manifest a surface awareness, a consciousness focused on clearly delineating the boundaries of bodies. The traditional, tenuous limits of the body dissolved into fused networks, into open circuits of interconnectedness, produce an ontological recognition that, from this perspective, urges the body into discretion. Closed off, guarded against infection, beware the surface; any exchange of fluid, that is, any disclosure of an open, leaking body threatens. A closed, self-contained body resurfaces from the within the integrated network.

 

But this is a different kind of discretion. It’s not the kind of discretion clung to by those who deny any fusion; it’s a kind of discretion, discreteness, that is a consequence of the recognition of indiscretion. So while the cyborg ontology takes as its premise the dissolution of traditional boundaries associated with the body, its referent in the texts of AIDS, epistemologically speaking, forces the body to resist coming to rest with those integrated circuits and, instead, reorganizes into discrete units. In this sense, discretion returns, not in the form of reactionary denial, but as conditioned by a cyborg-like system. In other words, if the cyborg ontology can be said to function as the discursive field upon which networks of social relations play themselves out, then that field must by willing to admit–indeed, it has already admitted–the constructions of what might seem quite odd to cyborg theorists: writings and readings of the body grounded in discretion.

 

The resurfaced, discrete body/subject is different from its predecessor because the recognition of blurred boundaries is precisely that which makes the body resurface. “Discretion” functions, then, as an ambivalent marker for both sets of discourses and, as the foundational site for constructions, poses key questions. The discursive peril here, in terms of the discourses of AIDS, involves the confusion between a conservative “pro-family” stance and progressive reconstructions. In the representational treatments of AIDS, two different discrete bodies emerge: one that denies the cyborg and ultimately prescribes racist, classist, and homophobic attitudes; and one that reorganizes discretion within the AIDS-body circuit. Confusing the two could potentially elide the latter construction as well as its ethics. For instance, media campaigns have urged the use of condoms, but they have done so within an atmosphere of repressive (hetero)sexuality; consequently, safe sex, instead of organizing an erotic economy, becomes an unreliable alternative for those heterosexuals who won’t say no. The racist, classist, and homophobic subtexts remain intact and the white, middle-class, heterosexual family assumes the position of general public all over again.

 

This is not to say that a circulatory ontology ought to be abandoned, nor is it to say that any codings of the body as a discrete unit will necessarily become subsumed by mainstream representation. In fact, I believe that too many areas have seen a reformulation of discretion, a resurfacing of the body, to leave such a pessimistic reading intact. One obvious example in the U.S. involves strategies organized around women’s reproductive rights. When, for instance, abortion rights activists carry signs reading “Bush, get out of mine!” we engage in a similar move that recognizes existing intervention and then expels the groping hands of legislators from women’s bodies and reformulates a discrete body, closing off from the lesislative machinery. This analogy was reinforced during this year’s 4th Annual Gay and Lesbian Film Festival held in Olympia, Washington: I saw a man wearing a button with a slogan made famous by reproductive rigths activists–“My body is my own business.”

 

For these reasons, I would suggest that working within postmodern network theory to discuss AIDS strategy, or even some other “indiscretions” such as reproductive rights practices, can grant a crucial sense of agency to renegotiate some of the blatant horrors of mainstream representation. Working within a single field of relations that resituates perceptions of both “official” AIDS representation as well as those who criticize it diffuses the rhetorical and positional strength of a centralized power dictating, and conditioning, meaning; this circulatory system affords the space for a localized biopolitics and active resistance. It posits resistance, not at the expense of agency but, rather, as a condition of agency; and with mainstream representation continually constructing helpless, objectified “AIDS victims” awaiting “certain death,” the discursive leverage to act and re-act obviously takes on added significance for persons living with AIDS.

 

It’s a type of agency that carries with it, and can put to use, the contextual histories of the networks from which the subject emerged. Material, contextual conditions become built in to the theoretical frame, rather than being held in opposition or tension with the theory: this type of agency does not recognize a traditional distinction between “theory” and “praxis” or “theory” and “experience” because the material context of the networks produces the agent. Agency loses its abstract, theoretical, and often vague status and becomes recognizable only through its multiple material contexts. Moreover, the specificity of agents differs across contexts: the resurfaced agent of reproductive rights discourses would not be the same agent progressive AIDS strategies produce since each is conditioned by differing intersections of networks.

 

In this case, resurfacing the body becomes the mechanism through which one sense of agency can be constituted. Resurfacing the body then, within the postmodern, exposes mainstream investments as it articulates a new space, a revitalized subject, as it recodes discretion from within the circuits of systematicity. At the same time, tropes of postmodern networking that posit a process of integration, of dissolving, don’t necessarily end there: within and beyond the blur can lie a resuscitated agent ready for action.

 

Casting agency in this way can revise ideas about authorization. The realm that denies cyborg-like integration ultimately leaves intact traditional sites of authority, sites with various investments in the “general public”: for example, bio-medical research, the position of Surgeon General, governmental and legal policy decisions. On the other hand, a large scale recognition of this resituated interconnectedness, and the subsequent resurfacing of the body–of some–might begin to shift those sites of authority. If this recognition is granted, attention might be (re)drawn toward those whose experience is most most important and whose energies are spent organizing pro-active strategies. In other words, the agency evolving through the resurfacing could loosen the mainstream’s hold on the discourse about AIDS and create an opening for actions such as: having more than one PLWA speaking at the International AIDS conference; ending the scientific community’s holding of people for ransom; or instituting a media campaign that can offer something more effective, and finally less dangerous, than a choral cry to just say no.

 

Notes

 

1. Statistics from Douglas Crimp, “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism,” 11 (in the volume of the same name, edited by Crimp).

 

2. All quotes from Crimp, 8.

 

3. For further historical perspectives see Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox, AIDS: The Burdens of History, Dennis Altman’s AIDS In the Mind of America, and Simon Watney’s Policing Desire. Randy Shilts provides a journalistic history of AIDS in And the Band Played On, but his account is both voyeuristic–awkwardly, he scrutinizes the life of Gaetan Dugas, alleged “patient zero”– and morbid–he keeps a running tab on AIDS cases, deaths, and projected deaths. Douglas Crimp has also noted a homophobic attitude in the book: see his essay “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism” in Crimp, ed. For specific analysis of the construction of “disease” see especially Paula Treichler “AIDS, Gender, and Biomedical Discourse: Current Contests for Meaning” in Fee and Fox. See also Charles Rosenberg “Disease and Social Order in America: Perceptions and Expectations,” and Gerald Oppenheimer “In the Eye of the Storm: The Epidemiological Constructions of AIDS”–both in Altman. For discussions of health care and biomedical discourse, see Douglas Crimp “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic” in Crimp, ed.; Daniel M. Fox “The Politics of Physicians’ Responsibilities in Epidemics: A Note on History” in Fee and Fox; Suki Ports “Nedded (For Women and Children)” in Crimp, ed.; Mark McGrath and Bob Sutcliffe “Insuring Profits From AIDS: The Economics of an Epidemic” in Radical America 20.6 (1986): 9-27.

 

4. For further reference on intertwinings of discussions of “risk groups,” “general public,” and “origins” see especially Watney’s Policing Desire, “The Spectacle of AIDS” in Crimp, ed., and “Missionary Positions.” For discussions of homophobia in representation see Watney, Crimp, Cindy Patton, and Leo Bersani (in Crimp, ed.), among many others. Observing that most media coverage of AIDS addresses a heterosexual audience, the “general public,” while completely eliding the fact that homosexuals are part of that audience, Bersani complains that “TV treats us to nauseating processions of yuppie women announcing to the world that they will no longer put out for their yuppie boyfriends unless . . .” (“Rectum” 202), and that the “family identity produced on American television is much more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister” (203).

 

5. For instance, Gregg Bordowitz “picture[s a] coalition of people having safe sex and shooting up with clean works” (Crimp, ed. 195), while Linda Singer outlines an erotics of “body management” (“Bodies” 56). Watney has called for an “erotics of protection,” an arena which would include “huge regular Safe Sex parties [with] . . . hot, sexy visual materials to take home” and “safe sex porno videos” (Policing Desire 133-4). Similarly, Douglas Crimp urges that “gay male promiscuity should be seen…as a positive model of how sexual pleasures might be pursued” (“How to Have Promiscuity” 253).

 

Works Cited

 

• Altman, Dennis. AIDS in the Mind of America. Garden City, NY: Anchor, Doubleday, 1986.
• Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” Trans. John Johnston. The Anti-Aesthetic. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983.
• Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ Cultural Activism. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1987.
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