Viral/Species/Crossing: Border Panics and Zoonotic Vulnerabilities

We are all in this together, and we will all get through this together.

Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, June 11, 2009

Immunity and invulnerability are intersecting concepts, a matter of consequence in a nuclear culture unable to accommodate the experience of death and finitude within available liberal discourse on the collective and personal individual. Life is a window of vulnerability. It seems a mistake to close it.

Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science

In late April 2009, a novel strain of influenza, now understood to be composed of a recombination of genetic information associated with avian, human, and two swine viruses, made its debut in Mexico. Commonly referred to as “swine flu,” given initial concerns that the virus had shifted from a strain infecting pigs to one affecting humans, the strange permutation of novel influenza A (H1N1) was soon declared to have resulted in a viral pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). Within six weeks of its emergence, close to thirty thousand confirmed cases in seventy-four countries had been identified (WHO 2009c). By September of 2009, nearly three thousand people had died and preparations for a second “wave” of the pandemic were well under way.

Despite the swiftness of its transmission, the swine flu did not deliver upon its catastrophic promise of massive infection and death on a “global” scale. Indeed, in January 2010 the WHO began to respond to allegations that it had produced, in cahoots with Big Pharma, a phony pandemic designed to “bring economic benefit to industry.” Countering this accusation, WHO director-general Dr. Margaret Chan responded with a “reassurance” that the virus was, in fact, serious; as she put it, “The world is going through a real pandemic. The description of it as fake is wrong and irresponsible” (WHO 2010b). But after a further seven anticlimactic months coming down from H1N1 alertness, Dr. Chan, invoking a biopolitical global population in the process of address, reminded “the world” that “pandemics, like the viruses that cause them, are unpredictable.” With that, the H1N1 pandemic was deemed to have run its course, and August 2010 was marked as the time of transition into an official “post-pandemic period” (WHO 2010a).

This essay emerges in partial response to the multiple border vulnerabilities (national, affective, species) illuminated by “zoonoses,” dis-eases that stealthily cross, via viral recombinations, the heavily invested species border between human and nonhuman animals.¹ Through two brief but exemplary cases drawn from Canadian institutional responses to the swine flu pandemic, this essay aims to generate space to explore the entanglements of biopolitics and pandemic governance, and, more specifically, what the multiple border panics invoked by the specter of unstoppable risk illuminates about the state of the nation-state under conditions of “late” capitalism. I critically examine the seemingly paradoxical responses of Citizenship and Immigration Canada to the problem of migrant agricultural laborers sourced from “ground zero” of the pandemic, along with those of Health Canada to the declaration of a “swine flu state of emergency” by chiefs of First Nations reservations in the northern regions of the province of Manitoba to offer a cartography of the increasing convergence of bio- and necropolitics in shared spaces of the nation (rather than spaces of exception). To do this, I proceed through an analytics of “global apartheid,” a referent that attempts to name the ways that smoothed apparatuses of governing “life itself” rely on endlessly intimate, intricate, and proximate geographies of striated difference, where subjects of life and those subjected to death jostle up against one another, cheek by jowl, but not “higgledy-piggledy.” Viruses, especially those that move across species boundaries, insistently reveal the fundamental interdependency and vulnerability of all lives and thus illuminate the very conditions upon which (affective) politics unfold today. Their crossings, and governmental responses to their crossings, therefore have much to tell us about the contemporary role of the nation-state in the multiplication of capital.²

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