Cohen, “Figuring Immunity” (2001)

 The group began as per usual with questions:

 

This essay is doing many different things, some more explicit and some more implicit.  A history of a metaphor of “immunity” and a problematization of the metaphor.  One set of problems concerns the biopolitical problematization that seems dominant in the paper.  Another, more implicit set of problems, concerns a kind of metaphysical form of critique with respect to how certain conceptions of biomedicine alienate the subject from their environment.

 

The politics involved in the medicine of epidemics (188-189).  How did epidemics become something like an obligation for the state?  And how later did the germ become a kind of political agent?  What makes it political is not just control but also that you need concepts and understandings of germs to function as new kinds of political justification.  There is a dual political aspect of epidemics, which is somewhat present in Foucault.  Intersection between politics, research, and germ as political agent.

 

This piece discusses Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic.  How is it mobilized and how does it fit in?  (See p. 182)

 

What is his theory of metaphor?  What’s at stake in “immunity” being a metaphor rather than something else?

Two methodological issues.  -- Shift around p. 193 from a more descriptive history or descriptive genealogy to a more of a judgment.  -- Methodological conceptualization of relation between Bernard and Pasteur (p. 190): “intellectual and technological conditions of possibility”.

 

 

 

Discussion began:

We discussed advantages and disadvantages of the concept of “metaphor” for the argument here.  Does the question of linguistic change/baggage require the idea of metaphor in contrast to truth?

We discussed what kinds of problematic assumptions the metaphor helped bring in.

We detected two forms of problematization in the piece.

-Problematizing the biopolitical effects of a certain form of medicine.

-There is a further problematization in the piece in a way that concerns the relationship between the subject and ‘the world’.

The former critique is focused on effects (e.g., political effects).  The latter is critical of the metaphor of “immunity” itself.

How do we weigh the competing benefits of, as it were, ‘getting the metaphysics right’ versus the benefits of the social consequences of what individualistic germ theory produced in terms of vaccination, eradication of smallpox, etc.?

How does this relate to Foucault’s discussion of how the environment reappears in medicine?

Does the author overplay the dichotomy between individualized medicine versus environmentalized medicine?