The Biopolitics of The Killer Virus Novel

The Biopolitics of the Killer Virus Novel
Author(s): Stephen Dougherty

Source: Cultural Critique, No. 48 (Spring, 2001), pp. 1-29
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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THEBIOPOLITICS
OFTHEKILLER
VIRUSNOVEL
Stephen Dougherty
It is a paradox
that the ascendance
of biology and biomedicine
in the pantheon of sciences has led to the debiologization of the

human body. Yet in the last fifty years, many life scientists have gone
from thinking of the body as an organic and holistic unit, understood
in functionalist terms, to thinking of the body as a technological communications system.1 As Donna Haraway has charted in a series of
seminal essays, life science is becoming a branch of systems theory,
and its fundamental precepts and organizing principles are now far
more likely to come from the world of communications technologies
than anywhere else.
In the most acclaimed of these essays, "A Cyborg Manifesto,"
Haraway clarifies the nature of the link that has fused biology and
communications technologies in recent decades: "communications
sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common movethe translation of the world into a problemof coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly,
reassembly, investment, and exchange" (164).2As Haraway's emphasis on the matter of power and resistance suggests, there is nothing
politically or ideologically neutral about the desire to translate the
body into code. It is a desire that marks the body unequivocally as the
privileged site of capitalism's epochal struggle to reduce all heterogeneity to equivalencies. Governed by a logic that seeks to fit
individuals and populations ever more securely into the integrated
circuit of global capital, this desire for a purely discursive translation of the body is the historical end-product of a technology of
power that seeks to administer living bodies in a highly regulated
CulturalCritique48-Spring 2001-Copyright 2001 Regents of the Universityof Minnesota
2 | STEPHENDOUGHERTY
and productive fashion. Thus, the desire to encode the body does not
signal the start of a new regime as much as it represents the further
extension and intensification of an old one: what Michel Foucault has
called the regime of biopower, the whole panoply of social, cultural,
and political technologies and practices that seek to provide the right
form and substance for the production of "docile bodies."3
At the same time, however, it is clear that this translation of the
organism "into problems of genetic coding and readout" (164), as
Haraway puts it, marks a significant transition in the history of the
ideological construction of the body and a point of crisis as well. In
modernity the body has been subjected to many kinds of inscription.4 But an ontological shift whereby the corporeal body is turned
into an information system, a purely discursive network of signs,
begs a number of serious questions. If, according to the psychoanalytic principle, body parts, perceptions, and sensations constitute the
foundation for the symbolic order, what effects are such a radical
(re)codification of the body likely to have on the social field? What
happens to politics and social struggle if capitalist social relations
penetrate the body so completely as to reduce it to the universal currency of information? What happens to the status of knowledge if
biology, the knowledge of our bodies, becomes "a kind of cryptography" (Haraway, 164), a study of the dead letter? And what becomes
of human agency when the corporeal body loses its privileged place
in the world of things?
In this essay I shall consider how anxieties generated by such
questions have registered themselves in recent popular fiction. One
might assume that cyberpunk would prove to be the most fruitful
genre to investigate. After all, no other popular fictional genre so
emphatically promotes digitality as our new metaphysical principle;
no other genre naturalizes so effectively what the cultural theorist
Jean Baudrillard refers to as "the neo-capitalist cybernetic order that
aims ... at total control" (Simulations, 111). However, this is precisely
what disqualifies cyberpunk for these purposes. While cyberpunk
rides roughshod over the borderland between the organic and the
postorganic, generally speaking, it fails to register signs of the crisis
in the bodily representation we are in search of. It fails to trouble in
any truly self-critical manner the smooth continuity of transition
THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL | 3
from the organic body to the coded text, from the flesh and the blood
to the data structure, that its exemplary texts too often glibly assume.
Istvan Csiscery-Ronay's indictment of cyberpunk is not directed at
exactly the same offense, but it does help to clarify the point I am
trying to make. According to Csiscery-Ronay, cyberpunk is not only
"the apotheosis of the postmodern," it is also "the apotheosis of
bad faith" because it suspends questions about "whether some political controls over technology are desirable" (193). Resistance to the
corporate-governed and media-dominated techno-future in cyberpunk fiction is not only futile, it is also inconceivable-as is resistance
against the "coding up" of the body that this dystopic corporate/
media hegemony demands. Thus, Csiscery-Ronay argues that the
ideology of cyberpunk undermines our freedom to make important
choices about what kind of future we wish for ourselves and about
whether or not the application and evolution of certain technologies
is likely to affect humanity in pernicious ways.
I want to turn Csiscery-Ronay's criticism to our present purposes by examining a scene in William Gibson's Neuromancer, the
locus classicus for cyberpunk. Neuromancer'shero is Case, an "interface cowboy" who jacks into the disembodied world of cyberspace in
order to steal sensitive information from vast, complex, and heavily
defended data systems. In this scene, Case's software deck shorts
out. The familiar virtual field of the matrix disappears, and he mysteriously finds himself on a long, sandy beach with his former lover,
Linda Lee, who has died earlier in the novel. It's not long before Case
begins making love to Linda Lee, or rather the synthetic data structure that used to be Linda Lee:
she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was
a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and
pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way,
could ever read.
The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the
coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal
part shooting off against the wall as salt-rotten cloth gave, and then he
was in her, affecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even
here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some
stranger's memory, the drive held. (239-40)
| STEPHENDOUGHERTY
Beyond the fact that none of this is "really" happening, what is

most striking about this passage is how the narrative collapses the
flesh into the data structure so completely, and with such utter felicity. Even as the body stands most fully revealed as "flesh" (i.e., in its
sexual function), it is recodified in a fit of digital ecstasy and emerges
on the far side of the organic/postorganic divide as something
uncanny. In the larger context of the novel per se, Gibson's point
would seem to be that it is all about data even when it is not, and that
while the body's ur-code may be unknowable due to its infinite complexity, it is nevertheless potentially decipherable and manipulable
as code, and therefore potentially subject to a kind of deep structural
decoding and recoding according to social exigencies. The lesson
of the code is reinforced a couple of pages later, at which point Case
wakes after intercourse to a strange vision of "faint neon molecules
crawling beneath ... [his] skin, ordered by the unknowable code"
(241). While this repetition may point to the feared danger of an ontological drift back to the organism after orgasm (which would be
counterproductive, given the novel's fetishization of virtual realities), there is no crisis of representation here. Instead, there is only
Case's tacit acceptance of the impossible thrill of cybersex, and the
text's implicit authorization of what Shawn Rosenheim refers to
in his reading of the above passage as "the cognitive shell game" that
has just occurred-the "failed Manichean encounter between an
embodied and a symbolic identity in which the binary terms collapse" (109).
If one is in search of popular fiction representations of bodily crisis and expressions of authentic anxiety about humankind's fate in
an increasingly digitized, late capitalist society, then the place to turn
is the killer virus novel. Like cyberpunk, the killer virus novel displays an obsessional focus on body parts and the body image. But
while cyberpunk exalts the body as both a genetic and technological
assemblage, the killer virus novel imagines instead the loathsome
disintegration of the organic body beset by infection. Likewise, both
cyberpunk and the killer virus novel imagine the ascendance of "life
forms" that operate strictly according to the principle of digitality: in
the former genre, the artificial intelligence (or AI), the ROM construct, the idoru, to cite some examples from William Gibson's novels;5
and in the latter genre, the ancient, protean virus itself. But while the
human protagonists in cyberpunk belong themselves to the brave
new binary world, in the killer virus novel binarism is the enemy, the
principle by which the alien, "undead" virus takes over the organic,
living cell that serves as its host. Thus, the problem of "resistance" in
its multiple connotations-immunological,
political, ideological-is
at the heart of the killer virus novel. For unlike cyberpunk, where the
ontological interface between (residual) organic and (emergent) digital being is economically and socially productive, and where "cowboys" can still find space to exercise their manly individuality despite the ideological oppressiveness of their digital world, the killer
virus genre conjures an apocalyptic vision of the increasingly limited
capacity of resistance in a world governed by the code.
But at the same time, the texts we shall investigate give voice
to practices and techniques of resistance against the dehumanizing
incursion of the virus/code that must themselves be resisted due to
their political and ideological regressiveness. In the phantasmagoria
of the killer virus novel, saving the human from the code will ultimately demand the recuperation of an all-too-serviceable colonialracist logic: the white West affirms its humanity by denying the full
humanity of the nonwhites who most viscerally embody the threat of
viral contagion. Saving the West from the technological forces it has
unleashed on itself, in other words, will mean reenacting the "stunning reversal" of the colonial era whereby, as Donna Haraway
explains, "[i]n the face of the disease genocides accompanying European 'penetration' of the globe, the 'coloured' body of the colonized
was constructed as the dark source of infection, pollution, disorder,
and so on, that threatened to overwhelm white manhood (cities,
civilization, the family, the white personal body) with its decadent
emanations" (223). As in the late nineteenth-century frame, in the
late twentieth-century frame this reversal allows Europeans and
European-Americans to legitimize their economic voraciousness in
the trumped-up name of species survival. The incongruity of such
logic is mirrored in the contradictory attitude the killer virus novel
adopts toward the biological body: it wants to save the organism (and
the species) from its impending digital transformation, but in order
to do so, it must mutilate it beyond recognition.
| STEPHENDOUGHERTY
THE FATEOF THE HUMAN

I want to return briefly to the above passage from Neuromancer.Linda
Lee, we recall, pulls Case down "to the meat, the flesh the cowboys
mocked." Although the meat reference might seem insignificant, the
reader familiar with Neuromancerwill identify it immediately as a
mantra, a representational trope whose accumulated repetitions
prior to this point in the text lend it considerable importance. We
learn early in Neuromancerthat "the elite stance" shared by Case and
other interface cowboys "involve[s] a certain relaxed contempt for
the flesh. The body was meat" (6), and when the meat talks, one tries
to ignore it (152). Locomotion in real space is spurned as "a meat
thing" (77). This mantra is taken up in killer virus texts as well. But if
the meat-body trope is best understood as part of an ascetic strategy
of bodily disavowal in cyberpunk, it serves a different purpose in the
killer virus novel. Here, the biological body is not dismissed; it is
mutilated. In Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, the fiction/nonfiction
hybrid that brought the contemporary killer virus genre into its own,
it is proven to the reader that the body is meat through the persistent
and disturbing narrative representation of its susceptibility to corruption and disintegration. The agent responsible for this is the "hot"
tropical virus. Preston describes one such virus that threatens to
break out of its African fortress and devastate mankind:
The Marburgvirus was a traveler:it could jump species; it could break
through the lines that separate one species from another, and when it
jumped into another species, it had a potential to devastate the species.
It did not know boundaries. It did not know what humans are; or perhaps it knew only too well what humans are: it knew that humans are
meat. (139)
The Cardinal strain of the Marburg virus, Preston explains,

"could multiply in many different kinds of meat. It was an invasive
life form, devastating and promiscuous. It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature" (138). Though Preston attempts to displace the obscenity onto the natural world, in fact it is an obscene
desire that motivates and impels the text that he writes. For Preston's
description of the virally infected body is itself obscene, devastating,
THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL
17
invasive, and promiscuous; and indeed, it is feasible to suggest that

the killer virus novel from Preston on has operated primarily as a
vehicle for the pornographic representation of volatile body fluids
escaping their boundaries, breaking the dike of the integral flesh, and
leaking in every direction.6
Early in TheHot Zone, Preston describes the Ebola victim Charles
Monet's bodily disintegration while he is en route in an airplane to a
Nairobi hospital:
His eyes are the color of rubies, and his face is an expressionless mass of
bruises.... The muscles of his face droop. The connective tissue in his
face is dissolving, and his face appears to hang from the underlying
bone, as if the face is detaching from the skull. He opens his mouth and
gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly.... The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as the vomitonegro,
or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled
liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with
fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. (18)7
As we discover, the body is subjected to so much violation in contemporary killer virus novels that it ceases to be a body, strictly
speaking. Rather, it is what is left over from itself after the virus has
had its way, the irreducible residue of its own organic functioning.
One more revolting description will sufficiently prove the point. In
The Blood Artists, Chuck Hogan describes a doomed victim whose
skin "rot[s] off his body in a fetid stink, marble-sized boils and violet
tumorous ulcerations marking the dark map of his flesh. It was less
than flesh, a fungus that had grown up over a skeleton" (23). Flesh
yet less than flesh, the body becomes alien to itself in Hogan's novel.
In its viscous reduction to ungovernable flows and seepages, it is
transformed in its totality into what Julia Kristeva calls the abject,
those elements of the body that are susceptible in our culture to being
symbolized as impure, and whose symbolic refusal helps to constitute "the clean and proper body" of the socialized individual.8
But at the same time, the killer virus novel threatens to negate the
logic of the abject, as well as the psychological register within which
the abject functions, because there is no proper body for the social
subject left to be split off from that which does not properly belong to it.
| STEPHENDOUGHERTY
The body in the killer virus novel attests to its own permeability, a hallmark feature of literatures of bodily anxiety. But more radically, the virally infected body attests to its susceptibility to total
collapse into an "outside" that no longer functions to demarcate the
condition of possibility for the "inside." The killer virus genre thus
presents a world where the boundary between the human as a biological entity and what lies outside it is profoundly unstable, so
that man as a subject threatens to fall back into the object worldand more specifically, as we shall see, the animal world-that surrounds him.
The keen attention the genre pays to disappearing faces, as in
Preston's above description of the dissolving face of Charles Monet,
is an index of its perverse fascination with the disappearance of psychology and subjectivity. The clinical term for this process, Preston
explains, is "depersonalization, in which the liveliness and details of
character seem to vanish" (19). The term is borrowed from Paul
Schilder's pioneering work on the body image that he began in the
1930s. Elizabeth Grosz sums up Schilder's notion of the body image
in this way: "The body image unifies and coordinates postural, tactile, kinesthetic, and visual sensations so that these are experienced
as the sensations of a subject coordinated into a single space; they are
the experiences of a single identity.... Relative to its environment,
the body image separates the subject's body from a background of
forces" (83). But in depersonalization, as Schilder understood it, the
subject loses interest in his or her body due to a kind of catastrophic
libidinal disinvestment of either parts or the whole of the subject's
body, an event triggered by some psychological or physiological
trauma. The subject thus "fades" in depersonalization, which is of
course the final product of its fading ability to distinguish self from
other, figure from ground, center from periphery.
In The Hot Zone, the nightmare scenes of disintegrating flesh
Preston conjures are motivated by precisely the same experience that
intrigued Schilder: the loss of (relation with) the organic body.9 And
the precipitating trauma is the anxiety itself about the fate of the postmodern body that haunts the killer virus genre. In effect, Preston
accomplishes a terrifying materialization of the effects of the psychical
(and psychotic) refusal to invest any narcissistic libido in the body
image. A face dissolves, a subject disappears, although the body's
irreducibility in the process of subjectivization is always marked by

the pools of viscous slime that are left behind.
These are apocalyptic intimations, to be sure. But it is hardly the
end of Preston's tale; for in the subject's old place something else
arrives on the scene. Charles Monet doesn't simply die as the result
of viral infection, or rather, he doesn't die right away. First he
becomes like the virally infected, babbling computer hacker in Neal
Stephenson's Snow Crash-an "automaton" (19), governed by a
purely mechanical insistence following regression to a semiconscious
state. Preston explains: "The higher functions of consciousness are
winking out first, leaving the deeper parts of the brain stem (the
primitive rat brain, the lizard brain) still alive and functioning. It
could be said that the who of Charles Monet has already died while
the what of Charles Monet continues to live" (19).
We are in classic Gothic terrain here: the place of the undead,
where the reign of the who is suspended-the reign of the liberal,
autonomous subject, the counterpart of the organic self-and the
what threatens to take over. The what is not exactly the virus itself, but
that which the virus embodies. A couple of definitions will prove useful here. Preston explains that "[a] virus is a small capsule made of
membranes and proteins. The capsule contains one or more strands
of DNA or RNA, which are long molecules that contain the software
program for making a copy of the virus" (83). In language mimicking
Preston's, Patrick Lynch explains in his novel Carriersthat the virus is
"[n]o more than a tiny capsule containing one or more strands of
DNA or RNA-the material that has made up the genetic code of
every organism in the history of the planet.... [T]he virus contained
the software-the genetic code-for making a copy of itself, and that
was all" (97). What is immediately striking about these definitions is
how they refuse any ontological distinction between the gene and
the software program. Given the terms provided, it is nearly impossible to distinguish between a human virus and a computer virus:
both species of virus are codes that integrate themselves into previously existing complex-coded structures, and then begin replicating
themselves by rewriting to their own specifications. Indeed, such
definitions promote a blurring between the human virus and the
computer virus that inevitably redounds on our sense of the ontological difference between humans and computers themselves.
10
I STEPHENDOUGHERTY
As the narrator suggests in Phillip Kerr's The Second Angel, the

virus "provides a kind of 'nexus' between our two life forms-the
siliceous and the carbonaceous" (432). This viral mediation clearly
encourages the readers' acceptance of the reigning orthodoxy that,
first, human behavior is an expression of genetic information, and
second, human genetic information is encoded according to the same
principle of digitality that governs computer code. But my argument
in this section is that the killer virus novel's pornographic representation of bodily mutilation and dissolution is a reifying strategy
meant to counter precisely such orthodoxy. By focusing so obscenely
on the materiality of the flesh and the blood, by lingering so perversely over the human experience of pain and suffering, and by
insisting so unrelentingly on the reality of its embodiment, the killer
virus novel promotes the organic frame of reference. But as soon as
the virus arrives on the scene, it induces a perspectival shift that
threatens to dissipate the organic frame and to force the reader
instead to consider the body in the manner of cyberpunk: as a postorganic (postmetaphysical, posthuman) entity whose being is merely
a function of the fetishized code.
What, then, is this terrifying, mechanical what that threatens to
displace the sacred who of organic, autonomous selfhood in the killer
virus novel if not the code that the virus embodies? As represented
by Preston and Lynch, the virus is pure information, and in its elemental purity it is like a monster, "a motive without a mind. Compact, hard, logical, totally selfish" (Preston, 85). What the monster
seeks is to proliferate the code: it is "dedicated to making copies of
itself" (85). The infectious scenario is one wherein the body is
besieged by a glut of information that threatens not only to overwhelm the immune system, but at the same time to transform the
nature of what it means to be human. The virally infected and desecrated body thus becomes a metaphor for the fate of the human in
the information age.
CONSUMER IDEOLOGYAND THE GENETICCODE

In an age of simulation the virus is the perfect monster with which to
frighten ourselves. It is a copy without an original; it is information
THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL I 11
without context, and thus without meaning; it is beyond representation-which is not to say, as we shall see, that it entirely defies association with those organically marked bodies that have served as
models in the Western world for what is always potentially monstrous and infectious. Nonetheless, the virus is sufficiently protean
to connect with contemporary audiences in a visceral way and to
deliver a timely message.
This message has not been lost on Jean Baudrillard, who returns
over and over to phenomena from molecular and biological sciences
in order to articulate his cultural critique of the postmodern: to the
figure of the virus and to DNA and the genetic code. In Baudrillard's
well-known paradigm of cultural transformation, we have passed
through three orders of appearance, or simulacra, in order to arrive at
our postmodern moment. The first is theatrical, the Renaissance
order of the counterfeit and the crafted baroque object that is an imitation of nature; the second is mechanical, the nineteenth-century
order of mass production of an original and the serialization of
objects; the third is purely structural, the order of the simulated
model that refers to no prior reality (no original) and to the code that
governs this new world that has escaped from the gravitational pull
of the real. Although Baudrillard's discussion of the emergence of
third-order simulacra is replete with cybernetic metaphors, as
Stephen Watt suggests, "even these are finally subsumed under the
biological figures in his discourse of viruses, mutations, and the allpowerful genetic code" (142).
In Simulations, Baudrillard describes a postmodern world where
the great dialectical models of human agency and history (Hegelian,
Marxian, Freudian) have been displaced by the purely immanent digital code. This is the world that television heralds, where the difference between passive viewing and active intellectual engagement is
collapsed and where media images achieve such immanence that
they are no longer distinguishable from reality. This is, of course, a
familiar indictment. But what distinguishes Baudrillard's criticism
of television culture from its more conventional, and more liberal,
formulations (such as Christopher Lasch's or Neil Postman's) is the
next step. For Baudrillard, there is an intimate relationship in Simulations between the mediazation of society on the one hand (i.e., the
zombification of the television-viewing, consumer-driven masses),
12
STEPHENDOUGHERTY
and what can only be described as the increasing fetishization of the

genetic code in contemporary culture on the other hand (i.e., the
increasing popularity of genetic and biological determinism, for
example, of "nature" over "nurture" arguments in research coming
out of various medical-scientific communities). They are both, in
Baudrillard's view, symptoms of a culture where human agency has
been severely eroded, where "[t]he slightest details of our behaviour
are ruled by neutralized, indifferent, equivalent signs, by zero-sum
signs like those which regulate 'game strategy"' (58). But for Baudrillard, DNA has a prior explanatory power (a mythic power)
such that "we must imagine TV on the DNA model" (56). In this
model we are governed by a process of control that is not at all like
the panoptical model that Foucault describes. (Hence, as Baudrillard
urges, we must forget Foucault.) Inspired by the biologist Jacques
Monod's mechanistic and deeply metaphysical understanding of
DNA, Baudrillard models a process of control that is instead much
more immediate-and therefore, what is most troubling, one where
the possibility of effective resistance against it, which is never precluded in'Foucault's paradigm, is virtually nonexistent.
In Baudrillard's DNA paradigm, the process of control, which
is both biological and sociopolitical at the same time,10goes immediately from the genetic code, or the script, to the living substance that
it informs without any "traversing of an effect, an energy, of a determination, of any message" (56-57). Hence, all our thoughts and
actions once attributable to free human spirit are suddenly discovered to be programmed. The consequences of this collapse of multidimensionality, as Baudrillard suggests, are indeed catastrophic:
"[t]he whole traditional mode of causality is brought into question:
the perspective, deterministic mode, the 'active,' critical mode, the
analytical mode-the distinction between cause and effect, between
active and passive, between subject and object, between ends and
means" (55). The classical world of referentiality passes away along
with the very ground for authentic human agency, and the onedimensional world of the referendum and the "mystic elegance of the
binary sign system, of the zero and the one," emerges in its place
(106). "What a mutation," Baudrillard writes with characteristically
misplaced exuberance,
with signals of the code, illegible, with no gloss possible, buried like
programmatic matrices light-years away in the depths of the "biological" body-black boxes where all the commandments, all the answers
ferment! End of the theatre of representation, the space of signs, their
conflict, their silence; only the black box of the code, the molecular
emitter of signals from which we have been irradiated, crossed by
answers/questions like signifying radiations, tested continuously by
our own program inscribed in the cells. (104-5)
On the DNA model we are all automatons like Charles Monet in

TheHot Zone, doomed to live out our days in the hyperreal purgatory
located somewhere between our symbolic extinction and the final
end that is always implied by Baudrillard's fascination with catastrophe and fatal strategies. Indeed, contemporary killer-virus discourse
shares a penchant for fatal strategies and much more in common
with Baudrillard's discourse. In both cases, as soma and psyche
become digitized, the threat posed to the social field is biologized.
Watt comments apropos of Baudrillard: "Like the HIV virus, which
through the enzyme reverse transcriptase proliferates slyly by affecting reversals an organism is slow to recognize until finally the virus
becomes a part of the host chromosome and its genetic information,
the [televisual] image in the third order of simulation is at work too,
twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, effecting changes
which may be barely discernible as it sells itself and the ideology that
manipulates it" (146). This viral process has transformed America
most spectacularly and endangers the rest of the world via a logic
of contagion. The planet becomes increasingly prone to the viral incursion of the American advertising image and American hype,
Baudrillard suggests, as the ideological alternatives to consumercapitalism evaporate.
THE LESSON OF ZERO

It is only a small step from Baudrillard's description of U.S. cities and
their people as "a loose network of ... hypertrophied cell tissue proliferating in all directions" (America, 125) to the representation of
American cities endangered by plague in killer virus novels; and it's
14
| STEPHENDOUGHERTY
a small step, too, from the digital zero-sum signs that haunt the pages
of Simulations to the part-man, part-killer-virus monster named
"Zero" in Chuck Hogan's The Blood Artists. In order to solve the riddle of the deadly and aptly named Plainville virus, Hogan's protagonist Stephen Pearse urges that "we have to understand him.... We
have to learn from him. Zero has something to teach us" (247). The lesson, it turns out, is appropriately Baudrillardian and McLuhanesque:
"I am the Messenger," warns Zero. "What you call 'Plainville' is the
message" (237). In a still more sinister and provocative fashion linking the meat-body to the destiny of the medium, Zero exhorts: "The
world is full of meat. You cannot stop the Messenger. You cannot stop
the Message. The message will always get through" (238).
While The BloodArtists clearly belongs to the tradition of TheHot
Zone, the modification Hogan makes by conjuring the "biological
model of a man-virus" (247) is both wildly entertaining and, if one
considers it as a kind of object lesson in the social dangers of Baudrillardian postmodernism, educational as well.1 Zero is an evil protagonist who harks back to the uniquely solitary and aberrant figure
of Dracula.12 But there is also something shockingly routine about
him-especially in the wake of recent school shootings and the ensuing national debate about the connection between the ubiquity of
media images and violence. The "hyper-psychology" of Zero is both
all too Baudrillardian and all too familiar:
We're talking about a being uninhibited by any obligations, social or
moral. Combine the worst elements of a serial murderer, a rapist, an
impulsive arsonist. Hyperaggressive, hypersexual, homicidal, egocentric, pathological. An unqualified sociopath ... All Zero wants to do is
infect, infect, infect. (249)
Hogan's description of the psychological devastation caused by

the Plainville virus reminds us of Charles Monet's ravaged psyche.
But in terms of our unfolding interpretive schema it is still more
suggestive:
We know that Plainville targets the brain.... There is psychological
damage to the brain, unique psychological damage, and whatever
resulting chemical imbalances, all combined with the rudiments of
infection. As higher functions began to fail, the brain's only alternative

for survival would be to simply switch them off.... I would say he
[Zero] exists in a state where dreaming and waking have become one
and the same. (248)
While the critical/theoretical resonances here go well beyond

Baudrillard and McLuhan,13Zero's condition has a peculiarly postmodern valence. Like Baudrillard's American, Zero is primitive,
amnesiac, immoral; he is "into" his infected body in an intensely
hedonistic way;14he lives and moves as in a dream, where he has no
choice but to embrace the obscenity that viral infection has made
him.
Those who are infected by him suffer the same fate. The Christlike scientist Pearse, whose desire to spare a young girl's life in Africa
leads directly to the international spread of Plainville, learns how to
defeat Zero only after becoming like him. He explains: "My eviscerated immune system was lashing out blindly at the virus, turning on
healthy tissue and vital organs.... I was defenseless against myself,
and this was Plainville's greatest perversion" (256). The danger,
Pearse realizes, is that he will become like Zero-that he will switch
his allegiance from the small, dedicated band of biotech warriors
who are out to rid the world of Zero and join forces with the monster
instead. "You know what's happening to me," Pearse warns his longtime friend turned bitter nemesis Peter Maryk, the rock of the new
church of biotech. "Kill me if I start to run. Promise me, Peter. You
won't let me become like him" (258). But as Pearse and Zero both
know, the message is difficult to resist, and Pearse's mutation has
already gone too far. Just before the final showdown, Zero is convinced that Pearse's primal, viral nature has won out: "You are with
me now Doctor. We are the Messenger. We are the Message.... The
Message must get through. To that end, we may rely on our great heritage, Doctor" (338).
Ambiguously referring to himself at one point as "the nadir in a
long slide from humanity" (271), the reader can't be certain until the
conclusion whether Pearse will fight for the posthuman Zero or
for the human race. But what is established with certainty early in
the novel is Pearse's intimate identification with, and construction
by, global media. As the director of the world's preeminent health
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organization, and as a celebrity surgeon general on the model of C.

Everett Koop, Pearse becomes a twenty-first-century media guru for
"good health and clean living" (57), a "health messiah" for the masses
(58). His program The Disease Dilemmapremiers as "the highest-rated
worldwide primetime broadcast" (57), and it soon becomes a staple
on satellite networks around the globe.
Zero is absolutely right: Pearse is the messenger as well as the
message. Thus he sets out deliberately to infect Pearse (to rewrite the
coded message of the genetic/social script Pearse embodies) because
Pearse is already a known pathogenic agent, both infecting and
infected-a media figure par excellence. This is why the reader must
suspect Pearse all the way up to his final confrontation with Zero. As
Maryk insists, there is something too programmed, too false, about
Pearse. Even his final sacrifice for the greater good of world health
and humanity smacks of the scripted, the hyperreal, the media event
tailor-made for popular consumption. It's sensational news when
Pearse contracts the dreaded Plainville virus, but his funeral is even
bigger news. Pearse's memorial service becomes "a world-wide
media event" (364), with the president and other heads of state gathered to pay their last respects. Realizing that "[t]he live on-line television broadcast afforded me a unique pulpit, instant electronic
access to as much as 98 percent of the species" (364-65), even the
media-shy Maryk takes to the airwaves at Pearse's service. However,
he prefers to ruminate on the hard, unpleasant lesson of Zero rather
than on the thoroughly bourgeois lesson about good health and clean
living that Pearse popularized:
I took the podium and told the world that I had seen in Zero the end of
all man. I said that, as Zero had been overcome by the destructive virus
that had created him, so too would man ultimately fall victim to his
own devastation. Man, I declared, would consume his host earth. (365)
To be against the digital virus is to be for the human organism.

But to be for the human organism is also to be against the planetary
organism-the woefully abused "one-celled earth" (367), as Maryk
rather inexpertly puts it. In the figure of Zero, the onset of the
posthuman condition is thus crucially linked to the environmental
devastation of the biosphere;15 and although Maryk's audience is
ill-prepared for his green speech-his words are greeted with awkward silence by those in attendance at the memorial service-the
reader of the novel (Hogan's audience) is fully prepared. As in other
killer virus texts, the environmentalist plea echoes like a refrain in
The BloodArtists.16Maryk himself vigorously sounds the initial warning earlier in the novel: "We are a fungus spreading over this planet,
colonizing, warring, consuming. The Earth is a cell we are infecting.
And nature is the Earth's immune system, just now sensing the threat
of our encroachment, and arming itself to fight back.... Viruses are
the Earth's white blood cells. We are the Earth's disease" (224). Just as
the human species suffers from the viral incursion of Plainville, the
Earth suffers from the metastatic replication of the human species.
Man voraciously consumes the earth's resources, but like rats, only
worse, as Maryk scornfully observes, he repays nothing to the earth's
ecological system.17
Maryk's rage may strike a chord with environmentally attuned
audiences, but it puts him in an awkward position, to say the least.
Following Maryk's logic here, which mirrors the logic of the text, he
cannot claim in good faith that his (and Pearse's) war against Zero is
a "good war." Zero is clearly represented in the novel as a malign
threat to mankind. But from the ecological point of view that the text
at least partially endorses, Zero must be considered as a force for
good. Like the Artemis virus developed specifically to slow human
population growth by targeting women in Stephen Kyle's Beyond
Recall, or like the genetically reengineered influenza virus meant to
redress "the infestation of a species gone amuck" (289) in John Case's
The First Horseman, Zero is represented as an immuno-agent of the
biosphere, a T cell fighting for Mother Earth, and his destruction
merely ensures that the planet's infection by mankind will continue
to spread unchecked. Conversely, Maryk may be a good doctor, but
he is out of necessity also (like Pearse) a monster himself. As his
patient Melanie inveighs in a heated exchange with the doctor,
Maryk is not a healer so much as he is a destroyer (216). So why, she
questions Maryk-and the reader must question as well-would he
fight to destroy Zero if the apocalyptic destruction of the human
species that Zero himself is fighting for is, in Maryk's own professional opinion, the more beneficial, since it is the healthier,outcome?
Melanie's answer is not logically satisfying, but it's the only answer
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available: it is because Maryk is "the ultimate man ... the ultimate

consumer" (224).18Which is also why, if Pearse is the messenger and
the message, Zero is right again to proclaim that "[i]t is Maryk for
whom the Message is" (338).
THE POSTHUMAN AND THE INHUMAN

Maryk's dilemma, his capture by the double bind wherein his ministrations on behalf of man assure the destruction of the environment
that sustains man, is the dilemma of The Blood Artists. Indeed, as I
shall consider in conclusion, it is a defining contradiction in the killer
virus novel more broadly. At the same time that killer virus texts pay
homage to a progressive, environmentalist agenda, and at the same
time that they tacitly acknowledge the fragmentation and multiplicities of a postmodern selfhood that is commensurate with the environmentalist ethos, they reinforce an integral and paranoid model of
subjectivity that harkens back to the high era of Western imperialism.
Out of a kind of historical necessity, they also reinscribe the complex
of racist attitudes that nurtured this paranoid subjectivity. In terms
of political imagination, then, the great failure of the killer virus
texts is that the only alternative to the posthuman condition they
are capable of imagining is a return to man on the imperial modelthe white man hell-bent on subjugating both "nature" and other
peoples whose less technologically advanced social conditions
threaten his fantasy of human dominion over nature. Like medical/
cultural discourse in the colonial era, contemporary killer virus novels represent brutal aggression against nonwhites as epidemiological
defense in the name of an endangered humanity.19 Indeed, just as
Donna Haraway warns that "[t]he residue of the history of colonial
tropical medicine and natural history in late twentieth century
immune discourse should not be underestimated" (223), neither can
the lingering presence of colonial racist discourse in killer virus texts
(the trade paperback version of immune discourse) be underestimated or written off as a merely unfortunate generic idiosyncrasy.
As with Zero's lesson, we can avail ourselves of the unpleasant
lessons that this racist presence speaks, but only if we confront it
head on.
In The Hot Zone Preston details in docu-fiction style a U.S.

Army-sponsored expedition to Kenya that occurred in 1988. The
purpose of this expedition, which was hosted by the Kenyan government and the Kenya Medical Research Institute, was to locate the
suspected point of origin for the Marburg virus, which had killed a
young Danish boy visiting his parents in Kenya in 1987. The expedition focused on Kitum Cave, located near the base of Mount Elgon in
western Kenya, and the headquarters were set up at the Mount Elgon
Lodge, a dilapidated resort that was built during the height of the
colonial era. Preston wistfully explains that the lodge "had once
been surrounded by English gardens, which had partly collapsed
into clay and African weeds. [But] [i]ndoors there were hardwood
floors, waxed daily to a perfect gleam" (145). Preston reflects more
analytically, and more historically:
The staff [local Masai] spoke very little English, but they were intent on
maintaining English hospitality for the rare guest who might happen to
show up. The Mount Elgon Lodge was a monument to the incomplete
failure of the British Empire, which carried on automatically ... in the
provincial backwaters of Africa long after it had died at the core.
(145-46)
The casualness with which Preston registers his nostalgia for the
colonialist past and with which he expresses colonialist/imperialist
assumptions about, for example, the relative desirability of the English way and the hierarchical relation between the province and the
metropole, is striking. But it is not uncommon in the killer virus
genre. Indeed, the image that Preston conjures of the hot-waxed
British Empire rolling into the twenty-first century on automatic pilot
serves as an appropriate figure for how our "postcolonial" moment is
perceived, and valued, in the genre per se. In effect, killer virus novels ignore that we have emerged from the colonial era and that the
developing world is politically (if not economically) independent
from the old imperial metropoles. We witness instead a situation
wherein, as Laura Otis puts it, "[b]acteriology serve[s] ... imperialist
ideology" (5). The American scientists cum adventure heroes who
boldly go forth to do battle with evil viruses are the late twentiethcentury version of the "microbe-hunters," the epidemiologists,
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bacteriologists, and related medical personnel who, Otis explains,

were instrumental in nineteenth-century imperial expansion (5).20
They stand as ready reminders of the West's continued hegemony,
and they also help to cultivate a properly fascinated loathing of the
Southern Hemisphere and its dispensable, disease-prone peoples.
The virtuous Dr. Pearse, ever obsessed with health and cleanliness, explains to a group of international reporters that
One of the lessons of what we now call the "antibiotic era" of the previous century was that as weaker microbes fall away, more resilient ones
survive and emerge, and sometimes with a vengeance. We will never
eradicate viruses or bacteria from the earth, nor should we. What we as
a people must do is to seek to control viruses. (59)
In the context of the genocidal events that immediately precede

Pearse's lecture to the press, however, it is not clear whether the doctor is referring to the dark, infected people who suffer the brunt of
the pain and the suffering in the novel's representational world or if
at the same time he is referring to the deadly microbes themselves.
"America is no longer the world's policeman," Pearse concurs with a
British reporter; "it is its doctor" (59). But it's a fine line indeed
between a good doctor and a bad cop in The Blood Artists. At the
beginning of the novel, Pearse and Maryk are directed by the CDC to
investigate a mysterious viral outbreak in central Africa. What they
discover when they get there is a womb-like cave that "is simply too
hot to preserve" (42). Therefore both the cave and its surrounding
ecological system must be destroyed. They also find indigenous
tribal people who, infected and uninfected alike, must be sacrificed
for the sake of a greater, white humanity. "If we don't stop it here,
cauterize it, now," Maryk explains, "it's going to slip out of the jungle and march across the continent and the planet" (43). But Pearse's
kindness to a young African girl whom he allows to escape subverts
Maryk's brutal vigilance. The specter of pandemic disease that killer
virus novels conjure as their stock-in-trade is certainly horrifying.
But what is equally horrifying is their recuperation of an imperialist
model of Western selfhood in response to the dehumanizing threat of
the virus. In The BloodArtists, for example, Peter Maryk is the fantasy
of the imperial self as a defended "Christian" stronghold. Due to his
enhanced immune system, or what Pearse dubiously refers to as "the

monstrous aberrance of [his] genetic superiority" (49), Maryk is incapable of even catching a cold, let alone an exotic viral disease. In the
body of Peter Maryk, or "Dr. Peter Christian," the pseudonym he
uses in an article that he and Pearse coauthor about his strange
immunity, self versus non-self recognition is perfect; the white Christian warrior is impregnable.
But the fantasy belies the perpetually haunting anxiety that the
boundaries delimiting and defining the human no longer holdwhich is precisely why racist discourse proliferates in killer virus
texts. As a consequence of their generally regressive political consciousness, killer virus texts are compelled to rearticulate anxieties
about the posthuman condition into a species anxiety akin to that
which flourished in the last half of the nineteenth century. Thus we
must interpret both the former and the latter as variant expressions
of the same anxiety structure, insofar as they are both conditioned by
the fear of humanity's disappearance. For the sake of clarification I
want to turn to Etienne Balibar's excellent essay, "Racism and
Nationalism." Though it is easy to think of historical racisms as ideologies that have thrived on the emphasis of difference, Balibar suggests that racism has a secret affinity with universalism, that it has
always been a form of theoretical humanism. While the definition of
man is usually assumed as a given in the history and philosophy of
humanism, Balibar's argument is that man has always been a contested term, and the whole point of biological racism as it evolved in
previous centuries was to establish the parameters of man as species,
to establish "the difference between humanity and animality" (57).
Here, too, racism figures on the side of difference. But it is a difference that gets elided by the universal humanism that racism helps to
constitute. Racism establishes the universality of man. "The 'secret,'
the discovery of which it endlessly rehearses," Balibar writes, "is that
of a humanity eternally leaving animality behind and eternally
threatened with falling into the grasp of animality" (58).
In the species discourse that proliferates in killer virus texts, the
threat that monkeys and the "inferior races" pose to (white) humanity is almost as pervasive, and just as potent, as the viral threat.21Preston considers that "[m]onkeys are nearly identical to human beings
in a biological sense" (67). In Carriers,where the viral geography is
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relocated to the tropical jungles of Jambi Province, Indonesia, Patrick

Lynch examines a local legend involving the indigenous Kubu tribe
and the bilou, "the sleek black gibbon whose dawn song, it was said,
could move a man to tears":
According to the local people, the Kubu, the bilou and man had once
been one and the same. Only when the trees became too crowded did
their ways part, the bilou of the ground becoming men. That was why
the bilou were never hunted. They were cousins. They could walk
upright. If you killed one in cold blood it was like killing a man. (27)
Though it is impossible to tell whether the distinction that is

made between the Kubu and "man" belongs to the original legend
or whether it is the author's invention, Lynch is clearly intrigued by
the notion that the Kubu are not men, that they belong to another
species altogether. He returns to it later in the novel when the highbred Holly Becker is following Kubu tribesmen through the jungles
of Jambi Province and on to the viral epicenter in search of her missing children: "The three Kubu tribesmen moved fast through the
forest, their small sinuous frames dodging through the chaos of vegetation. Crashing and stumbling after them, Holly felt as if she
belonged to a different species" (220). Elsewhere, the expression of
species anxiety as racist (as well as sexist) commentary is even more
boldly offensive. Moreover, the narrative voice in Carriers tends to
elicit confusion about whether or not such commentary is entirely
independent of the inner thoughts it reports on behalf of the novel's
characters. The following scene, where Holly Becker steps off the
plane that has transported her from New York City to Padang,
Indonesia, is exemplary:
At that moment Holly Beckerentered the room. Willis watched her walk
through to take a seat on the veranda. She was wearing a print dress and
canvas shoes. Willis hadn't seen a western woman for the whole six
weeks he'd been in Padang; it was all knotty little Australian businessmen with attach6 cases, or bowlegged Japs, or the dreamy locals, and to
see such a beautiful white woman-well, it made an impression. Thick,
dark hair pulled back in a purple velvet bow, and the most beautiful
eyes he had ever seen outside of a fashion magazine. Big dark eyes, with
thick lashes. (108-9)
Given that Willis drops out of the story shortly after the reader
makes her initial acquaintance with him here, the racist invective is
entirely gratuitous, as is the novel's anachronistic representational
emphasis on racial physiognomy, on degraded facial characteristics
like a "flat nose" or a "prognathic mouth" (36); and as is the American character General Bailey's reference to the Indonesians as "our
little brown friends" (151). But that is precisely the point. Although it
serves no practical function in terms of plot or character development, the casual racist commentary performs an unfortunate (and all
too familiar) kind of cultural work: it attempts to secure the boundaries of the human by defining it over and against others whose
humanity is denied.
Let us return to Balibar. Starting from his observation that
racism is a form of theoretical humanism according to which the
parameters of man are established, he concludes the following:
It would ... be very wide off the mark to believe that theoretical racism
is incompatible with any form of transcendence, as has been argued by
some recent critics of culturalism who, moreover, commit the same
error in respect of nationalism. On the contrary, racist theories necessarily contain an aspect of sublimation, an idealization of the species,
the privileged figure of which is aesthetic.... This ideal connects up
both with the first man... and the man of the future (the super-man).(58)
Certainly there is no lack of such aesthetic idealizations of the

species (read: the "white race") in the killer virus novels we have
been investigating. For the idealized female form there is the pictureperfect Holly, who makes her first appearance in the novel lying "on
her back, naked in the middle of the floor" of her Manhattan highrise (11). For the Neitzschean superman there is Peter Maryk, who embodies the manly qualities of a stern white warrior (brutality, fierce
intelligence, single-mindedness) as well as those of a supremely
gifted scientist and artist (creativity, know-how, insightfulness,
inventiveness). But if Maryk is indeed the man of the future, thus
affirming the infernal Neitzschean motif of the repetition of the
same, then the prospects are no less frightening than if Zero turns out
to be our new man. As Donna Haraway observes, "the perfection of
the fully defended, 'victorious' self is [itself] a chilling fantasy, ...
whether located in the abstract spaces of national discourse, or in the
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equally abstract spaces of our interior bodies" (224). And while the
world-changing social and technological forces that we have unwittingly unleashed upon ourselves are certain to trigger nightmares,
we must recognize that the choice between the two monsters offered
by the killer virus novel is really no choice at all.
Notes
1. For a useful overview of these developments, especially in molecular
biology, that have led to the re-visioning of the body as an informational system,
see Richard Doyle and Evelyn Fox Keller. For a cross-disciplinary look at how
information theory has made its presence felt in both the sciences and the
humanities since World WarII, see N. KatherineHayles.
2. Besides "A Cyborg Manifesto," see also Haraway's essays "TheBiological Enterprise:Sex, Mind, and Profit from Human Engineering to Sociobiology,"
"In the Beginning Was the Word: The Genesis of Biological Theory," and "The
Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitution of Self in Immune System Discourse." All these essays are collected in her Symians,Cyborgs,and Women:The
Reinventionof Nature(New York:Routledge, 1991).
3. Foucault famously considers the cultural (re)productionof docile bodies
in Disciplineand Punish.
4. Peter Brooks and Francis Barkerengage in useful analyses of the body's
representational status in Western literature and culture of the modern era.
the "hardwiredROMcassette
5. One recalls Dixie Flatlinerin Neuromancer,
about in her green bag; or
skills"
that
totes
a
dead
man's
(76)
Molly
replicating
the inhuman Josef Virek in CountZero,whose body cells are stored in a huge vat
from which he is capable of projecting himself as a holographic image of his
formerly embodied self; or Rei Toei in Idoru, the wildly popular, multimedia
celebrity-construct whose dreams are digitally projected into music videos.
6. I want to distinguish between the tradition of what I am calling the killer
virus novel on one hand, and the related tradition of the contemporary "medical
thriller" on the other, best exemplified by Robin Cook's long series of popular
novels. Cook's fictions almost invariably feature viral outbreaks and endangered
populations, but his books do not enact the crisis in the bodily representation I
am charting wherein the limits of the "human" itself are interrogated. Rather,
Cook's novels are melodramas played out within the space of a liberal humanist
orientation that is never challenged. Cook's novels most prominently feature
heroic medical professionals battling evil corporate interests (Charles Martel in
Fever,Marissa Blumenthal in Outbreak,Jack Stapleton in Contagion,to cite a few
examples), and it is their heroism, their willingness to act as autonomous, free
agents in the face of corporate (and inhuman) domination, that Cook foregrounds.
In a real sense, then, Cook's novels are antithetical to the killer virus genre as I am
defining it.
7. What Preston counts on in gross-out descriptions like this is our common assumption that contagion flows-an assumption conditioned in the nineties in part by a culturally specific social construction of the dangers of HIV. But
for the sake of underscoring the fact that there is nothing necessary about Preston's representational style, or the contemporary killer virus genre's affinity with
the horror of bodily mutilation and disintegration more broadly, I briefly want to
consider Michael Crichton's 1969 plague novel, TheAndromedaStrain.Crichton's
influence on the contemporary killer virus novel is indisputable. But while the
plot trajectory Crichton first introduced hasn't changed-the sequence of events
is (1) emergence of a species-threatening plague crisis; (2) mobilization of the
medical/scientific community in response to the crisis; and (3) aversion of the
crisis, but with the caveat that it could easily happen again-both the quality and
the intensity of the violence perpetrated against the body has changed. For unlike
TheHot Zone,Crichton's novel features a microbial invader that kills bloodlessly,
and aescetically, by turning body fluids into a solid state.
8. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror:An Essay on Abjection,especially
chapters 1, 2, and 4.
9. Noting the obscene violence perpetrated against the body in fin-desiecle popular culture, Arthur Kroker has called our decade "the flesh-eating
nineties."
10. In Simulations,Baudrillardrefers to "a socialgeneticcode"(italics in original) that instantiates itself once capital becomes its own myth, once there is no
longer any way out of the machinery of capitalism (112).
11. Hogan's man-virus modification is in fact presaged in The Hot Zone.
Preston identifies the Ebola virus in the glossary appended to the book under
"Listof Characters."
12. The association is cinched by the disclaimer "this is not Dracula" (248).
The virus is like a vampire, or rather,the vampire is like a virus, a fact that establishes unequivocally the killer virus novel's affinity with the Gothic, as well as
its retroactive modification of the whole vampiric tradition from this new viral
perspective.
13. Indeed, these resonances harken all the way back to Poe and Baudelaire,
for whom the (proto)modern reality of mass consumer culture possessed a
disturbingly dreamlike quality. We also hear the echo in these lines of WalterBenjamin, for whom the consumer products of mass culture constituted a "phantasmagoria of false consciousness" (253), as Susan Buck-Morssputs it in TheDialectics
of Seeing.The reenchantment of the urban industrial world is most evident in the
where
arcades (today's shopping malls), Benjamin explains in his Passagen-Werk,
"commodities are suspended and showed together in such boundless confusion,
that [they appear] like images out of the most incoherent dreams" (quoted in
Buck-Morss,254).
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14. In AmericaBaudrillardwrites: "This 'into' is the key to everything. The
point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body. Into your
sexuality, into your own desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy
differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the 'into': the body is a scenario
and the curious hygienist threnody devoted to it runs through the innumerable
fitness centres, body-building gyms, stimulation and simulation studios from
Venice to Tupanga Canyon, bearing witness to a collective asexual obsession"
(35).
15. This link between viral infection and environmental devastation is
established early in Kevin J. Anderson's Antibodies,a killer virus novel based on
the X-Filestelevision series. In the following scene, Jeremy Dorman, the infected
employee of a bombed-out genetic laboratory,returns to the charred remains of
his workplace. He is stopped by the night watchman, Vernon Ruckman: "Witha
sigh, Dorman spread his hands against the soot-blackened wall and waited. The
skin on his hands was waxy, plastic-looking ... runny somehow. Vernon wondered if the man had been exposed to some kind of toxic substance, acid or industrial waste" (6).
16. Preston writes in TheHot Zone that "the earth is mounting an immune
response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the
planet, the cancerous-rot-outsin Europe, Japan,and the United States, thick with
replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to
shock the biosphere with mass extinctions" (407). In Carriers,Patrick Lynch's
characterHolly Beckeris struck with the epiphany that "[w]e're the disease here.
We're the virus" (366).
17. Peter Maryk's moral is thus economic as much as it is biological and
environmental: simply stated, it is that late capitalist man cannot consume on
credit forever.
18. Melanie and Maryk's dialogue possesses the status of a traumatic
encounter that the novel seeks at all costs to disavow any knowledge of. Reading
by the Lacanian lights that Slavoj Zizek provides, it is the "point of impossibility
around which ... [the symbolic structure of the novel] is articulated" (183). The
impossible nature of the dialogue, its radical exclusion from the "consciousness"
of the text, is clearly indicated by Maryk's stunned reaction and his curious unresponsiveness immediately following his exchange with Melanie: "He stared at
her, and a glimmer passed across his face-as though he were remembering suddenly that he was impaired and that things might not be necessarily as they
seemed ... But he wasn't listening to her" (224-25). The dialogue simply doesn't
register in Maryk's consciousness; it only recalls to his mind in a distracted way
some other trauma-a physical "impairment" that makes establishing normal
human relations exceedingly difficult for Maryk.
Following Zizek's cue still further,we discover a certain symmetry between
this unfathomable dialogue between Maryk and Melanie and the impossible figure of Zero himself. In TheSublimeObjectof Ideology,Zizek discusses the birds in
Hitchcock's 1961 horror classic by the same name as an example of the "objectin
subject" (182) of which Zero too is an ur-type: the terrifying materialization that
marks the empty place around which any symbolic communication necessarily
(at least from the Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective) occurs. Zizek describes
the birds, who are also harbingers of environmental devastation, in a manner that
evokes Zero: as an object with "a massive, oppressive material presence"; an
"embodiment of an impossible jouissance" (184). The enjoyment of the sexual
relation is stolen from the would-be lovers Melanie and Maryk so long as the
monster is on the loose and accrues instead to Zero's "excited flesh" (299) in his
perverted sexual pursuit of Melanie.
19. Laura Otis offers a fascinating examination of the various colonial
expressions of this inversion.
20. These bold American scientists in killer virus novels are also the descendants of the bold heroes of the self-consciously racist and race-oriented fiction of
WeirdTalescontributors such as H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (of Conan
the Barbarianfame). In Howard's 1936 tale "The Fire of Asshurbanipal," it is "the
age-old inheritance of the white man, the urge to seek out the hidden places of the
world" (36-37) that motivates American hero Steve Clarney on his Arabian desert
quest for a legendary jewel. But what he discovers instead in a forbidding, alien
landscape occupied by semihuman Bedouin tribes is "thatthere were Beings here
before [man's] coming, ... survivors of hideously ancient epochs" (57) that continue to threaten the human race. Howard's adventurer confronts in the crumbled ruins of an ancient Persian city a creature whose description is clearly meant
to invoke racial anxiety: "a gigantic and black and shadowy ... hulking monstrosity that walked upright like a man, but ... was like a toad too" (58). In The
Hot Zone "the monster live[s] in a cave," and biohazard expert Gene Johnson, who
is similarly possessed by the white man's inheritance, "[is] going in there to find
it" (144).
21. It was much the same way for imperial Great Britain.Anne McClintock
writes that: "In Victorian iconography, the ritual recurrenceof the monkey figure
is eloquent of a crisis in value and hence anxiety at possible boundary breakdown. The primate body became a symbolic space for reordering and policing
boundaries between humans and nature, women and men, family and politics,
empire and metropolis" (216).
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The Biopolitics of the Killer Virus Novel

Author(s): Stephen Dougherty

that the ascendance

of biology and biomedicine

in the pantheon of sciences has led to the debiologization of the

THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL | 3

Beyond the fact that none of this is "really" happening, what is

THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL | 5

THE FATEOF THE HUMAN

The Cardinal strain of the Marburg virus, Preston explains,

THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL

invasive, and promiscuous; and indeed, it is feasible to suggest that

THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL | 9

irreducibility in the process of subjectivization is always marked by

As the narrator suggests in Phillip Kerr's The Second Angel, the

CONSUMER IDEOLOGYAND THE GENETICCODE

THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL I 11

and what can only be described as the increasing fetishization of the

THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL | 13

On the DNA model we are all automatons like Charles Monet in

THE LESSON OF ZERO

Hogan's description of the psychological devastation caused by

THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL I 15

infection. As higher functions began to fail, the brain's only alternative

While the critical/theoretical resonances here go well beyond

organization, and as a celebrity surgeon general on the model of C.

To be against the digital virus is to be for the human organism.

THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL | 17

available: it is because Maryk is "the ultimate man ... the ultimate

THE POSTHUMAN AND THE INHUMAN

THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL I 19

In The Hot Zone Preston details in docu-fiction style a U.S.

bacteriologists, and related medical personnel who, Otis explains,

In the context of the genocidal events that immediately precede

THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL | 21

enhanced immune system, or what Pearse dubiously refers to as "the

relocated to the tropical jungles of Jambi Province, Indonesia, Patrick

Though it is impossible to tell whether the distinction that is

THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL I 23

Certainly there is no lack of such aesthetic idealizations of the

THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL | 25

THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL | 27

THE BIOPOLITICSOF THE KILLERVIRUS NOVEL | 29

Rosenheim, Shawn. TheCryptographic

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