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Immunity

Author: Victor Jeong

When Robinson Crusoe asserts the island to be “a whole country” that exists in a relationship of “mere property” to his sovereign self, he establishes a logic of the novel that is concerned with the formation of the individual as a category of being in relation to personal and material property (Defoe 247). As the novel’s protagonist protects their own property against the antagonistic forces that constantly threaten to violate the boundaries of ownership, what is at stake is the very sanctity of the notion of the individual as a self-containing category. If this logic undergirds a traditional understanding of the novel, what, then, is at stake in contemporary novels that implicate the violation of personal and material property as a primary concern?

The way to approach this question lies in Crusoe’s assertion of property over not only the territory of the island, but also the bodies of the “subjects” inhabiting it (247). In assuming sovereign property relations with other bodies, Crusoe crosses into the field of biopolitics and the concept of immunity — particularly what allows the individual to be protected from subsumption into a larger, sovereign governing body. In other words, it becomes a point of interest to view the novel as a site of contestation over the formation (and proprietary violation) of bodies that own and are owned. The simplest way to approach a definition of immunity for the novel is to recognize Roberto Esposito’s operative definition of “biopolitics” as the backdrop to which this term can be understood. Esposito describes the juncture between bios and nomos as two dialectically dependent terms key to the preservation of life: “politics is nothing other than the possibility or the instrument for keeping life alive” (24).  Thus, in defining the Latin word immunitas as the “inverse logic of communitas,” Esposito directs our attention to the connective munus, in Latin the “contract or duty” or as Esposito writes, “an obligation of reciprocal gift-giving” that contractually binds an individual to the community they exist within (27-28). Within a scope of legality, Esposito suggests, immunity is an exemption from this collectively established munus that grants an individual a state of “‘nonbeing’ or the ‘not-having’ anything in common,” with the community at large.

To reach a definition of immunity bound inversely to community, Esposito contextualizes the term in two modes of thought that place the formation of the individual as an act of separation and containment. The first context takes the spatialization of an immunity/community binary as the resulting logic of property ownership as a response to the alienation of personal liberty. Of the many thinkers that Esposito cites, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes form the two pillars upon which this reading is built. We may recognize the language of a contract that binds an individual to a community in the interest of preserving life as Hobbes’s definition of “sovereignty” as “involv[ing] both the renunciation or transfer of right and the authorization of the sovereign power,” (Stanford Encyclopedia, Hobbes). According to Esposito this contractual renunciation “jeopardizes individual identity,” a notion which echoes Locke’s conceptualization of property as a response to the authoritarian crisis of subjectivity. In his Second Treatise of Government, section 27, Locke introduces the labor theory of property in which “every man has a property in his own person … the labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.” In other words, the cultivation of space formed on the logic of property ownership becomes an act of self-preservation from the subjective threat of external authority. Thus, if Hobbesian sovereign authority supposes the social contract as a munus that protects its inhabitants from the threat of the outside, the Lockean conception of private property ownership provides a model of immunity predicated on physical separation and self-containment as the grounds for which a subjective individual can defend himself from that very munus.

For this glossary, interests in self-containment and the formation of subjectivity are concepts that are provocatively rooted in the study of novels. Claude Lévi-Strauss offers a more explicit connection between the self-contained subject and the novel in The Origin of Table Manners, where he states that “the hero of the novel is the novel itself.” This connection between the formation of the self and the formation of the novel is subsequently clarified through the overarching desire for containment via structure: “[the novel] tells its own story, saying not only that it was born of the exhaustion of myth, but also that it is nothing more than an exhausting pursuit of structure, always lagging behind an evolutionary process that it keeps the closest watch on” (131). In other words, for Lévi-Strauss, the novel’s formation of the protagonist is symbolic of the larger process where the novel seeks to defines itself through the drawing of structural boundaries. This exhaustive pursuit is ultimately one of separation and containment.

Lévi-Strauss’s implication of “an evolutionary process”, which the structural pursuit of the novel lags behind, offers a segue to Esposito’s pathological reading of immunity/community which further extends the us-them logic. The connotation of disease control and immunology offers Esposito an opportunity to explain his own definition of immunity: “the negative of immunitas doesn’t only disappear, but constitutes simultaneously its object and motor” (28). Read through the lens of vaccination, Esposito notes that in order to acquire immunity from a disease, “the political body functions similarly; introducing within it a fragment of the same pathogen that it wants to protect itself from, by blocking and contradicting natural development” (24). In this formulation, we see once again the interactive dialectic: the vaccinated community’s “introjec[tion of] the negative modality of its opposite,” can only be made sensible within the context of another self-containment or foreclosure of possibility in the “blocking and contradicting natural development” (28).  Once again, the preservation of life and the resulting formation of the self is predicated on a fundamentally binary logic of us-them that, for Esposito, operates within dualistic dichotomies of sick versus healthy, nation versus world, and property-owner versus authoritarian government.

With an understanding of how immunity is defined by Esposito, it serves me now to discuss Esposito’s biopolitics in the context of the global contemporary novel: what is immunity doing in the novel and, perhaps, what is the novel doing to the concept of immunity itself? The best way to approach this question, I believe, is through the way Esposito’s immunity describes self-formation as distinctly an act of separation or containment from a larger, dependent “other.” Two of the novels we have read for class this semester take on the question of self-formation most directly: the post-apocalyptic Zone One by Colson Whitehead which offers the most-fitting setting of a global, apocalyptic pandemic and Daniel Kehlmann’s Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes which takes up the question of how individuals form themselves in the connected age of the internet network. Following Esposito’s formulation of the way in which community instantiates a negative modality of immunity, both Zone One and Fame, I argue, will encourage us to see how novels contest this formulation as insufficient for a contemporary, global setting.

In Zone One, we will pay particular attention to Esposito’s vaccination logic, implicating a “blocking and contradicting [of] natural development,” as the diagnosable symptom for which a third category infiltrates the us-them binary: that of the “naturally developed” immune who have crossed over into sick and returned. This reading will help to unravel and unfold the logic of the global novel that suggests gentrification — or the exclusive acquisition of property — does not help in achieving immunity within the context of a survival game, but rather forecloses the only chances of survival. Turning then to Kehlmann’s Fame, self-formation as a distinct negation of community takes the form of a different contagion: fame. Re-instantiating the us-them binary as famous-anonymous rather than sick-healthy, Fame takes up the question of the formation of individuals as celebrities. The novel, in this case, presents the reader with a theoretical “update” in which a model of self-formation by fame operates by the immunitary logic of self-containment, fails terribly, and is replaced with a network-based model.

 

Model 1: Zone One by Colson Whitehead 

No one used the word “cure” anymore. The plague so transformed the human body that no one still believed they could be restored. Sure, rumors persisted that a team of Swiss scientists were holed up in the Alps working on processes to reverse the effects, but most survivors had seen enough skels to know the verdict of the plague could not be overturned. No. The only thing to do with a lassoed skel was to put it down. (82)

The most remarkable detail of Colson Whitehead’s Zone One is the fact that the government overseeing operations in a post-apocalyptic America has given up on developing a vaccination for the zombifying virus. This foreclosure of this horizon, the denial of the possibility for inoculation, forces the characters of the novel into a strict us-them binary between uninfected and infected. According to Esposito, “immunization is a negative [form] of the protection of life. It saves, insures, and preserves the organism, either individual or collective, but it doesn’t do so directly or immediately; on the contrary, it subjects the organism to a condition that simultaneously negates or reduces its power to expand” (24). Following the logic of vaccination, if inoculation represents each member of an immunized community carrying within them a portion of the infection, the abandoning of research suggests only two modalities of existence: the “single Us now, reviling a single Them” (291).

Following Esposito’s transfer of the logic of vaccination from the physical body to the “political” body, then, we see how gentrification and property acquisition becomes the only logic through which immunity from the plague can be established. The novel displaces the physical presence of sovereign authority to an aggregate headquarters of creative professionals[7] placed in the city of Buffalo, thus estranging intellectual production from material production. For the setting of the novel in Manhattan, however, the work of survival, of obtaining immunity from the zombifying plague, operates through the logic of containment and perpetual quarantine. Tracking the perspective of Mark Spitz and the Omega Unit sweeper team, humanity’s last hope hinges upon clearing out the infected inhabitants of residential property and refurbishing them for humanity’s use. The future of the people is predicated on the gentrification of space to accommodate a growing population that perpetuates an eternal segregation from the “others” that have been displaced. Although there is no explicit reference to gentrification, we see the implication of the practice through the character of Ms. Macy. Flying in from Buffalo on a helicopter, Ms. Macy arrives in Zone One to assess the progress on development, essentially embodying the role of a bourgeois city-planner or designer. Thus, the displaced authority in Buffalo which offers a contractual protection in exchange for individual subjectivity returns us to the Hobbesian model of sovereignty. Life is preserved through the contractual logic that sacrifices subjectivity in exchange for protection within the walls of Zone One.

We may notice that within this formulation of immunity by space acquisition that the formation of the self-contained individual vis-a-vis Locke is compromised: the communal living stipulations prevent the translation of labor into property ownership and thus immunity from sovereign authority. It can be argued that the novel relies on this seeming impossibility of forming the subject to place pressure on the rigidity of the uninfected-infected binary that presupposes the conditions of immunity. Returning to Esposito’s observation that part of the vaccination logic is the “blocking and contradicting natural development” and the subjection of the “organism to a condition that simultaneously negates or reduces its power to expand,” an inversion of the model begs the question: what is the natural development being denied?

The suggestion of a natural immunity turns us to the search for antibodies in the development of a vaccine. The novel states that “in the early days, the government required a stock of the recently infected and the thoroughly turned for experiments, to search for a cure, cook up a vaccine” (82). This effort to analyze the infected is one that falls short, particularly due to the degradation of the body in those infected, the irreversible “verdict.” In only analyzing the infected that have become skels, however, the possibility remains of the antibody-carrier: the individual who progresses from healthy to unhealthy and returns to healthy, thus becoming the individual carrier of blood with antigens that can dismantle the disease: a self-contained immunity.

Indeed, returning to the sweeper teams and particularly Mark Spitz, we see that Zone One offers a consideration of a third category that disrupts the immunitary binary is not merely a possibility, but an insurgent presence. In the configuration of immunity as an act of containment, the sweeper teams are the most consistent violators of this model: they traverse from the spaces of healthy to the spaces of the sick, straddling the lines of immunity and community. Mark Spitz’s arrival at Fort Wonton is described as “a deep immersion into a reanimated system,” whereas his journeys into the yet-to-be gentrified city are an equally deep immersion into the system of the reanimated (116). There also exists a psychological connection between the members of the sweeper team and undead that implicates an interstitiality unbegetting of the immunitary binary. Each sweeper is said to have a unique “appraisal of the dead,” and no example is more pertinent than Mark Spitz’s encounter with the Marge in the opening sequence of the novel in which the narrator remarks that Mark “recognized something in these monsters” (21). Even further than psychologically, however, it is suggested that the time Mark Spitz spends outside of the protective bubble of Zone One has permanently altered his body:

Certainly when the machine fired, it generated a localized atmosphere. But the ash did not shroud the metropolis, it did not taint the air in any sickening measure … But for Mark Spitz it was everywhere. In every raindrop on his skin and the pavement, sullying every edifice and muting the blue sky: the dust of the dead. It was in his lungs, becoming assimilated into his body, and he despised it. (239)

The assimilation of the “dust of the dead” into the body of the sweeper team members presents a paradox that undoes the logic of spatial acquisition sanctioned by the government. In other words, the possibility of a natural immunity is foreclosed not by circumstance, but by the artificial intervention of the sovereign authority through the abandoning of vaccination research.

What implication does this detail have, then, for the global contemporary novel? The key lies in returning to the question of subjective formation in the novel and a performed critique of ownership as the means to this formation in the context of a survival game. Returning to Ms. Macy and the rebranding efforts of the government, Zone One works particularly to dissolve the notion of self-formation by property ownership in a setting where the objective is to survive. The images of quarantined containment are often deflated in Zone One, evidenced through Mims’s memory of living in a community located in a mini-mansion. Although “the dead came to scrub the Earth of capitalism and the vast bourgeois superstructure … return[ing] us to nature and wholesome communal living,” the sectioning off of space between the infected and the uninfected becomes the marker by which communities have denied themselves the only true chance of surviving: obtaining natural immunity from the infection (135). We may consider then the notion that self-formation by containment becomes a logic undone in the context of a global pandemic in which the only means of survival is the sharing of antibodies that requires a portion of the infection to be within every individual. In showing the foreclosure of any visions of herd immunity, Zone One questions the global novel’s ability to formulate individuals through an exclusionary paradigm of immunity in a survival context where the avaricious logics of space acquisition fall away. In other words, through proposing the survival game in which the third category penetrates the us-them binary proposed by a model of immunity predicated on separation from an “other,” Zone One questions the global novel’s ability to form individuals through capitalist logics of property ownership and containment.

 

Model 2: Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes by Daniel Kehlmann

“You can summon the whole household. Maybe you’ll even get Ralf Tanner to come outside himself. But what would you have gained? Ridicule, mockery, an extremely unpleasant encounter with the police, and, if you keep this up, a charge of harassment. You’re dealing with a star, and that means zero tolerance. He has to protect himself.” (76)

Bringing Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Fame into the conversation requires a revision of the immunitary binary that I have employed up until this point. In noting Kehlmann’s awareness and subsequent inversion of the immunity paradigm in the novel, we see the immunity and community distinction taken up with the social contagion of fame. Thus, instead of proposing a binary of infected-uninfected or sick-healthy, Kehlmann’s novel operates within a model of famous-anonymous. Moving the conversation from the contagion of a zombie plague to the contagion of fame allows us to implicate the global contemporary novel’s relationship to new models of interconnectivity that place pressure yet again on the possibility of a Lockean view of the self-contained individual.

The connection of fame to the logic of self-formation by containment is made most explicit by Ralf Tanner’s mansion in the episode titled “The Way Out.” When the real Ralf Tanner attempts to re-enter his home, he is met by Ludwig who immediately denies him access to the estate on the presumption that he is an impostor Ralf Tanner (73-75). At this moment, private property becomes the separating line between the famous individual and the anonymous masses. The need to self-contain is justified through the presence of an overwhelming number of Ralf Tanner impostors who symbolize Locke’s view on the alienation of individual subjectivity. The language that Ludwig utilizes is even a familiar rationalization of self-containing exclusion — Ralf Tanner’s “star” status dictates that he must “protect himself.”  Instead of the government being the authority to which the individual must immunize themself, however, the novel proposes the growing presence of the Internet: a community who through the aggregation of information gives the means for another individual to impersonate Ralf Tanner and steal away the fame that affords him subjectivity as an individual. Therefore, the ownership of property, a deed of rightful, ownership and the physical space which can be attributed to Ralf Tanner, become the immunitary measures by which Ralf Tanner can be formed as a self-contained individual.

Yet, from this scene, we realize that something has failed within this model of self-exclusionary formation. The real Ralf Tanner is on the outside of the only supposed space that allows him the exclusionary means to define himself, while an imposter and successfully infiltrated the estate. By Ludwig’s own standards, the estate has failed to serve its immunitary purpose of protecting Ralf Tanner, the famous star, from the threat of the anonymous masses that might absolve him of his fame. To understand this failure, we may take a short detour to another episode, “The East,” which shows Fame’s deflation of the immunity paradigm.

“The East” follows the character of Maria Rubenstein, a novelist who takes an offer to replace the spot of Leo Richter in a literary tour destined to pass through Central Asia. The episode takes up the consideration of fame in an international, translingual context. The change of setting to Central Asia comes with the dissolution of name brand value for Maria Rubenstein. This is evidenced through the moment in which Maria arrives at the hotel that has been booked for her. Maria provides her name in the hopes of an acknowledgement of familiarity, an affirmation of fame: “Maria Rubenstein. I’m Maria Rubenstein” (81). This is returned with the shaking of the receptionist’s head who only provides her reprieve when Leo Richter, a name who happens to be on the list, is invoked (82). The mutual unintelligibility is summed up through “a disdainful gesture that obviously implied that nobody could understand what went on in foreigners’ heads” (82). It is ultimately this unintelligibility that prevents Maria Rubenstein from leaving the country after missing her flight. Unable to communicate with the locals, Maria is briefly imprisoned on a visa mishap and experiences a breakdown culminating in a frantic phone call to her husband in which she screams her own name in a desperate cry for recognition. The desire for recognition is cruelly mocked by Maria’s discovery of her own, most successful novel Dark Rain in a local bookstore (97).

The implications that Maria Rubenstein’s episode has on fame as a contagion comes through the moment in the bookstore. Whereas the marker of Maria’s fame exists within the Central Asian country, the immunity paradigm predicated on the exclusionary model of us-them falls apart in a transnational, translinguistic context. In other words, if the conditions for the formation of a self-contained celebrity implicates a separation from an anonymous public, “The East” demonstrates the failure of this effort across the semantic domains of nation and language. This is to say that Maria cannot formulate a self-contained individuality in a setting where the name brand that affords her a means of distinction from the public is culturally and linguistically untranslatable. To acquire fame through the negation of community requires a community that recognizes the immune individual’s candidacy for celebrity — be it the marker of being a famous actor or a renowned author. “The East” shows the result of an individual who fails to find the means of asserting immunity because the possibility of community implicates a recognition of commonality that is denied in Central Asia.

Returning to “The Way Out,” we may reflect briefly on the title of the episode as a clue to understanding its interaction with the concept of fame through the immunitary paradigm. After Ralf is rebuffed by Ludwig, we see the incursion of the us-them binary yet again:

He pushed his hands into his pockets and walked slowly down the street. He’d actually found the way out. He was free. He paused at a bus stop but then changed his mind and continued on his way, he had no desire at this moment to use public transport, it was always a strange experience when you looked like a star. People stared, children asked stupid questions, and used their cell phones to take photographs of you. (77)

By being replaced by an impostor in his own estate, Ralf Tanner moves from the sphere of the famous back to the sphere of the anonymous, a sensation which he labels as the acquisition of freedom. Through his reflection on public transportation, we see how fame as an immunitary paradigm of self-formation necessitates continual negations of community: Ralf must be stared at, be asked stupid questions, and take photos with strangers as a way to constantly affirm his immunity and distance from the anonymous masses. By being replaced by the Ralf Tanner impostor, however, the real Ralf can return to being anonymous, shedding the distinction and contagion of fame.

Focusing on the detail that Ralf achieves freedom from an impostor taking his place, however, we can see how Fame proposes a new means of self-formation divorced from spatial separation and containment. Ralf Tanner’s liberation from his own estate marks the escape of the individual being formed based on self-containment. The idea of finding the way out connotes the sense of entrapment implicated in the contagion of fame, not unlike the closed-off communities of Zone One that have foreclosed the possibility of survival. In the same way, the formation of self by spatial self-containment becomes like shackles to Ralf Tanner who exists in fame by being invisible and inaccessible to the public. The presence of the Internet in the episode, however, proposes the World Wide Web as the reason why Ralf Tanner’s invisibility to the public is an illusion. YouTube provides the outlet for others to carefully analyze Ralf Tanner’s behaviors and tendencies for the purpose of mimicry (70). This dissolution of Ralf Tanner into a series of dividual, repeatable behaviors and actions becomes the basis for his own escape from celebrity status.

The fact that Ralf is not contained but rather scrutinized and divided on the Internet not only rejects the model of self-formation by containment but also proposes a new model in its stead. The Internet not only turns Ralf Tanner into a dividual series of repeatable actions and behaviors, but it also expands the consideration of the individual from a single containable entity to an atomized network. On the website IMDB, Ralf notices a series of misinformations that locate him in places in the world that he has never been, such as China, doing activities for reasons that are conjectural and falsified (73-74). In this sense, not only does Fame deflate the formation of the celebrity by spatial containment, but it also suggests the impossibility of any containment of celebrity status in a world connected by the Internet network.

What implications does this imposition of the Internet have on the global contemporary novel? Returning to the question of the formation of individuals, Fame questions the idea of self-formation to constitutively be an act of containment and separation from an “other.” For Fame, the Internet becomes the backdrop by which separation from the “other” becomes impossible in the context of celebrity fame. In terms of globality, Maria Rubenstein’s story shows the older model of fame which cannot be translated across languages and distances, only for the outdated model to be updated in the context of Ralf Tanner. The Internet transcends borders of language and culture to bring fame to a global stage that cannot be contained. Thus, Fame shows us how the global contemporary novel, in its awareness of the Internet, formulates the individual as a succession of dividual, constituent details, and behaviors. Through this network model of self-formation, it is not by the immunitary separation from community that one achieves subjectivity, but by the unique cocktail of dividual details that constitutes the individual.


[7] In The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida outlines two broad categories of workers in the creative class: the super-creative core and creative professionals. The latter is responsible for problem solving based on intellectual topics and areas of study (2002).

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