Introduction: Immunity, Society, and the Arts

Immunity as a Boundary Project

Few concepts possess as much multivocal resonance across different realms of thought and practice as the concept of "immunity." Immunity is mobilized in the life sciences (including the biomedical sciences), social sciences, humanities, and the arts. Medical practitioners, ethnography-inspired scholars, cultural theorists, historians, philosophers, fiction writers, and artists all engage in different, yet often related, ways with the concept. Within all of these voices, immunity refers to the materiality of the human body and its proximity to other bodies, both human and nonhuman, while also referring to a more general way in which modern societies conceive of those bodies and enact them through biopolitical practices of difference. One might wonder whether the multiple layers of immunity are inherent in the concept itself or the result of a long heritage of borrowing and translating from an original source and single meaning of "immunity." Can a concept really make sense across so many realms, or has the term fallen victim to conceptual inflation at some point? But how can one judge that? Such a judgment would imply that one offers a definite and original definition of "immunity."

In making this special issue, we have sought no definite answer to the question of what immunity is, and we have taken care not to judge any use of the concept as "unwarranted"—at least not a priori. With respect to what, exactly, would one judge the "correct use" of a complex notion like immunity? Whether immunity is meaningfully mobilized as a concept can only be assessed, we feel, by looking at where it leads our thinking and understanding. This, however, does not mean that the history of the concept does not matter. On the contrary, it is this history that indicates how the concept gained traction in modern culture and the imagination.

The concept of "immunity" acquired a very strong biomedical connotation throughout the twentieth century, and immunology has indeed become a subdiscipline in its own right within the biosciences. This encourages the presupposition that the concept originated in biomedicine, and that it has a single, precise meaning that can only be redeployed in other disciplines through figurative meaning. In that respect, it is interesting to know that the term "immunity" did not emerge within Western biosciences. The term originated as a legal term in Roman law, and was taken up in the medical world in the nineteenth century, as Ed Cohen describes in his book A Body Worth Defending.¹ The term "immunity" had gathered legal, political, and militaristic connotations for centuries before it was taken up in biomedicine. Cohen indicates the fusion of the idea of legal immunity with a militaristic notion of self-defense in the biomedical sphere as the beginning of modern biopolitics. The consequence of this was that the complex relation and interdependency of organisms and their environments was reduced to one specific kind of relation: aggression versus response.² When the first medical theories about immunology or bacteriology were developed in the nineteenth century by Elie Metchnikoff, Rudolph Virchow, Robert Koch, and others, the medical theories developed by these scientists were embedded within a specific sociopolitical worldview. Koch discovered the cholera bacillus in a context of increased foreign trade and colonial activities that brought along fears and anxieties about possible dangerous diseases in the tropics that could be carried back to German ports. Immunology as a medical discipline was developed in a political context in which there was increased anxiety about national identity, selfhood, borders, and boundaries.

The term "immunity," then, had a history of usages, translations, applications, and connotations before it was taken up by Western biomedicine. Within biomedicine, the concept orients research practice and the elaboration of new theories, thereby gradually giving substance to a biomedical version of immunity and the emergence of the idea of an immune system as a specific reading of the human body in terms of self and other.³ The cultural and political practices that are informed by the idea of an "immune system" in turn form the basis of reflections in social, cultural, and...