One hundred years later, in 1998, the makers of The X-Files movie (based on the popular Fox TV show) imagined a somewhat different scenario of alien invasion. Seeking to colonize Earth, aliens conspire with a secret cabal of quisling humans to propagate a virus that will use human bodies as host organisms in order to gestate an invasion force destined to claim the planet. The aliens are defeated (but only temporarily, we learn in the following television season) after FBI agent Fox Mulder procures a weak vaccine against the virus from one of the aliens' human co-conspirators. Mulder then braves the aliens' headquarters under the ice of Antarctica--which also turns out to be their space ship--where he inoculates his partner (and possible love interest) Dana Scully, who is being held in cryogenic stasis after having been infected by the microbic agents of alienogenesis. The single injection causes an immediate, cataclysmic reaction to cascade throughout the entire bio-tech apparatus which sustains the colonization project, thereby causing all hell to break loose in the alien stronghold and forcing them to flee the planet. Thus, a hundred years after germs to which humans are immune save the planet from aliens, it is now the immune system that saves humanity from alien germs, or literally, from the germs of aliens.

In the interval between The War of the Worlds and the X Files movie the concept of biological immunity captures the Western imagination. Figured as a mode of organismic "self defense," immunity has permeated popular understanding in more and more intimate ways. Indeed, in its most general usage, it has come to signify a disbursed mode of boundary maintenance that characterizes a diverse set of actants ranging from bodies to nations to the planet itself. As the X-Files version of the planetary-colonial struggle demonstrates, the new battle for terrestrial control seems to take place in the interior of the human body. Aliens now appear as germs, and germs now literally as aliens, and the war for planetary domination takes place at the cellular and molecular levels. In this context, biological immunity appears as a radically potent physiological actor that defends humanity against a hostile otherness which threatens to eradicate its species being. Indeed, in the realm of the X-Files, the immune system's instantaneous response to inoculation is so powerful that it immediately propagates its effects throughout an entire alien starship and thwarts their well-laid plans to colonize Earth. Yet perhaps even more significant than its magical efficacy is the fact that biological immunity has become so accepted that it no longer even needs to be named as such. The mere gesture of Muldar's injecting serum into Scully signifies the bio-medical augmentation of natural immunity so succinctly that the audience gets no further explanation of what has occurred--despite the total chaos that ensues. Within last hundred years or so, immunity has evolved from a vague biological characteristic conferred through the processes of natural selection which offers humans a competitive advantage over the others who seek to appropriate our means of existence. At the turn of the millennium, biological immunity now figures as an incredibly powerful bio-defensive system, charged with protecting not just the individual organism but the planet as a whole.

Given how familiar the contemporary understanding of immunity as a form of organismic self defense appears to us, it may seem somewhat disconcerting to learn that this particular biological agent only appeared in the 1880s. Indeed, people are quite often surprised to find that long before it had any bio-medical valence whatsoever, immunity had a sustained and complex juridico-political history: it first emerged in Roman law where it defined the political status of the Empire’s subject peoples, it then underwrote early Modern nation building in Europe by finessing the tensions between the Roman church and the monarchs it ordained, and it has subsequently percolated through Western political practice as one of the primary instruments for negotiating the contradictions of, and limits on, national, local, and individual sovereignty. Yet today, few of us even recognize the connection between our sense that immunity naturally defends us against the pathogenic effects of dangerous germs and its much older juridico-political sibling. Nevertheless, the two remain intimately related. Indeed, I would argue that one of the reasons that the metaphor immunity was so quickly absorbed into the bio-scientific pantheon and has gained such purchase on the popular imagination is precisely because it represents our organismic existence in terms of the values and interests that have dominated our political and economic context for the last several hundred years. Concomitantly, the acceptance of immunity as a biological function naturalized these values and interests, making them appear as if they inhabit our physiologies rather than our ideologies. By reading biological immunity as an implied narrative rather than as a natural fact, then, we can begin to explore the ways that bio-science functions as an imaginary activity, albeit one that is also very material and very real.

The new incarnation of immunity emerged in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century as the avatar of a scientific practice that profoundly refigured how we understand and address both illness and healing. Indeed, its incredibly rapid acceptance as a robust biological concept fundamentally changed the embodiment of these essential human experiences. The appearance of immunity as a biological capacity occurred in the wake of the newly formulated “germ theory,” which linked the occurrence of infectious diseases to the ubiquitous existence of unseen and often deadly pathogens. As germ theory penetrated Western consciousness, it introduced a vast repertoire of potentially lethal actors onto the historical stage, making the world seem intrinsically dangerous--or even hostile—to us.²

In this germ-filled scenario, the new agents of mortality and morbidity marshaled such destructive capabilities that some form of natural protection was required in order to explain how humans have maintained our place at the top of the food chain (with “civilized” Europeans at the top of the pecking order). Immunity named this vital response. Conceived as a form of organismic protection, biological immunity described a fundamentally new perception about the body’s ability to withstand or repel the microbic antagonists that populate our environment. Thus, it came to designate the organism’s active--if not violent--engagement with (or against) the world in order to preserve the essential property which is the “self.”³

Predicated on a Darwinian belief that organisms struggle with each other for survival, biological immunity incorporated this struggle inside the body as part of its normal function. Moreover, it fused the agonistic spirit of Darwin’s evolutionary schema with the political ideal of boundary protection that had long underwritten familiar public health measures such as quarantines and cordons sanitaires—measures that often entailed military or navel enforcement. Metaphorically equating this militaristic model of geo-political defense with the ongoing “struggle for existence” that impels evolutionary development, immunity depicted the body’s all too breachable boundaries as potential sites for enemy invasion and located the possibility for counterattack inside the individual organism itself. This potent combination of natural and nationalist ideologies framed biological immunity as an organism’s capacity to maintain its “self” by defeating the hostile “others” that seemed to relentlessly threaten not only its vitality but also its very existence. Incorporating the same economic and political imperatives that made responding to epidemics a national necessity,⁴ immunity metaphorically injected politics into nature. By ascribing an explicitly juridical function to the living organism, immunity’s transplantation from law into biology simultaneously acknowledged, and yet also masked, the high political stakes entailed in the putatively “natural” phenomena of infectious disease. With the biologization of immunity, a political response to infection would now seem to emanate from the body itself.

Immunity’s debut as a bio-political, bio-medical paradigm partook of the highly vaunted historical process that Bruno Latour has wryly labeled “pasteurization.”⁵ Latour’s pun pointedly plays on the acclaim lavished upon Pasteur when, in 1881, he definitively showed that he could prevent sheep from contracting a fatal version of anthrax by inoculating them with a weakened strain of the bacillus which induced it. Nevertheless, in the wake of Pasteur’s triumphant vaccination experiments, bio-scientists struggled to make sense of his seemingly miraculous results. That vaccination worked seemed incontrovertible, but why Pasteur’s inoculations had succeeded in pre-empting fatal infections remained without convincing explanation. At the time, the prevailing biological theories sought to account for Pasteur’s unparalleled success by positing that organisms “passively” resist or recover from disease. These scenarios supposed that only pathogens act, while the infected (or “host”) organisms simply provide a more or less “hospitable” context for the microbes’ agency. In Pasteur’s own estimation, inoculation worked because the artificially weakened microorganisms that he introduced consumed the host’s available nutrients, making the vaccinated organism less nutritious, and thus less welcoming, for a more virulent strain of the same germ, thereby mitigating disease causing infestations.⁶

However, in 1884, the story radically changed: the Russian zoologist Elie Metchnikoff rejected the preceding paradigms and introduced the ground-breaking idea that organisms actively defend themselves against the agents of disease. Based on his earlier investigations of inflammation, in which he observed the behaviors of amoeba-like cells that he called “phagocytes” ingesting harmful or effete materials, Metchnikoff described “phagocytosis” as a normal organic reaction to parasitic infection that constituted a form of “host defense.” He labeled this defensive action “immunity.” ⁷

In so doing, Metchnikoff both introduced a new set of actions and actors into bio-medical imagination and formulated a new narrative about the ways complex organisms co-exist in a world with other organisms, some of which are necessary for their existence and some of which are extremely deleterious to it. In the wake of Metchnikoff’s renarrativization, immunity has come to designate an essential biological function that enables organisms to maintain a virtual separation—or perhaps a virtual cordon sanitaire--from a world replete with pathogenic invaders who might threaten their well-being in order to insure the continuity of their lives.

Metchnikoff arrived at this famous theoretical insight in a remarkably decisive way: he attacked a starfish larva with the thorn from a rose bush and observed the inflammatory results. The famous scene of Metchnikoff's 1882 encounter with the starfish larva has long since become the basis for medical mythology, beginning with Metchnikoff's own triumphal accounts of the experiment. Yet what seems importantly unnoted in most commentary on this event is that Metchnikoff's imputation of a defensive function to the amoeboid cells that he saw surrounding the thorn in the body of the starfish larva was predicated on his previous decision to injure the organism in the first place. The interpretation of the besieged organism's response as "defensive," then, seems to emerge at least in part as an effect of the meaning attributed to his own activity by the experimenter himself. In so far as phagocytosis comes to figure as the first example of active immunity--i.e., of immunity as an active organismic process and not as a qualitative description--it does so by incorporating Metchnikoff's assumption that his own aggressive relation to the subject of his experiment serves as the paradigm for all inter-species encounters. The characterization of phagocytosis as "defensive" therefore describes not simply the ways in which an organism marks a difference or distinction from its environment, but rather the way in which it responds to and engages with its life world--albeit a life world in which it is the subject of an experiment explicitly designed to harm it.

Characterizing phagocytosis as a "healing reaction," Metchnikoff conflates the defensive tropes he uses to comprehend the organism's "inflammatory reaction" with the organism's active bio-social engagement as a whole. He focuses on the cellular "struggle" that he imputes to the microscopic subjects he observes and articulates this struggle as immunity itself. From this fertile mix of activities, immunity emerges as a bio-scientific description of the "active struggle against bacteria" ¹⁰ and thus effectively supercedes healing as a general explanation for organismic processes.

With Metchnikoff, immunity becomes an essential action of the organism through which it both constitutes and defends its integrity; he thereby emplots a metaphoric basis for the entire edifice of twentieth-century bio-medicine. For this very reason, then, it is important to understand the implications of Metchnikoff's story as it came to make sense in the most material of ways: i.e., as the crux of a highly capitalized, techno-scientific enterprise of global proportions. When Metchnikoff introduces his interpretation of immunity as host defense, he equates the aggressive action he performs against the starfish larva with the activities of all organisms that co-evolve in a shared ecology. Parasite and host, aggressor and defender, eater and eaten, come to describe the restrictive immunological poles of organismic co-existence. Yet if we consider that when Metchnikoff's appeals to these images he necessarily generalizes what, following philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe, we might call "an action under description," ¹¹ we can begin to discern some of the limitations inherent in Metchnikoff's conceptual innovation.

Describing his own action as an aggression or an attack on the subject of his experiment, Metchnikoff conversely "recognizes" the organism's reaction as a defense. On the one side the thorn wielding scientist and opposed to him the phagocyte mobilizing organism. As an artifact of the experiment, the larva's response appears symmetrical to the experimenter's own description of his action and in so doing constitutes phagocytosis as a cellular "action under description" that manifests an "intention" imputed to it by the experimenter: host defense. This imputation not only suffuses the emerging immunological discourse but indeed enables it. In so far as immunity is conceptually linked to the organism's active struggle to maintain its distinction in a world that incessantly challenges its distinctiveness, the notion of host-defense incorporates the political assumption that bio-social "independence" is not only possible, but desirable. By actively asserting an "immune response" which is also a "defense reaction," then, the subject of immunological discourse manifests the intentions ascribed to it by its author as if the cellular and molecular matrix of the organism were responsible for asserting the subject's autonomy. Yet the innovative capacity of Metchnikoff's insight lies, I believe, not in the description he attaches either to his own actions or to those he imputes to the cells of his experimental subjects. Rather what Metchnikoff comes to recognize (albeit in a rather defensive way) is not only that all organisms exist in so far as they co-exist, but that this coexistence can also be negotiated "within" or indeed "as" the organism itself. In other words, Metchnikoff introduces the notion that an organism actively engages its life world as part of the processes through which it cohabits with other organisms in this world and thereby constitutes itself.

Unfortunately by restricting this co-existence under the rubric "immunity," Metchnikoff imports the bio-social assumptions that have accrued to this signifier over the last two thousand years. In so doing, he figures biological "immunity" as a state of exception or exemption designed to maintain the organism's ontogenic distinctiveness within a bio-social ecology, and thereby foregrounds defense as the organism's "most characteristic feature." Yet is this necessarily the case? Might it not be just as plausible to reframe this interpretation in light of our understanding of immunity's restrictive narrative economy? For if what we have for the last hundred years or so called "immunity" also implies a larger sense in which organisms constantly and actively engage their life worlds replete with other organisms (which is after all what contemporary immunology suggests) could this process of co-existence not also be described as "community"? And if so, how different might our lives be if we co-existed in a world where our bio-medical discourses and institutions informed us by supporting, not the actions of our "immune systems," but rather those of our "commune systems"--the systems which enable us to exist precisely in so far as we co-exist?

While this might seem a naive thought experiment at best, I believe it raises important questions about the values that have been implicitly corporealized as forms of explanation within bio-medicine. For, as Lawrence Kirmayer reminds us, "the choice of explanations in medicine is always a choice of values." ¹² How might we value health and healing, not just individually but socially, politically and spiritually, if we were to imagine that we are organismically engaged in taking responsibility for our living together in shared bio-social ecologies? Rather than assuming that we have evolved as organisms only in so far as we been able to defensively maintain our separation from the environments which both sustain and threaten us, might this redescription emplot a more engaged and dialectical narrative of organismic co-existence? Might a different story about how we cellularly and molecularly co-inhabit a planet replete with life that exists on multiple scales and in multiple domains provide us with different options for assessing and redressing the challenges we face both as organisms living among other organisms and as humans living among other humans? And might this not be something to be desired? I certainly don’t know the answers to these questions, but I guess am not immune from wondering about them.

Notes

1. H. G. Wells. War of the Worlds. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1988 [1898],187.

2. Bruno Latour. The Pasteurization of France. Trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 1988. Nancy Tomes. The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

3. The work of Alfred Tauber and his colleagues provides the starting point for my reflections on immunity. See Alfred Tauber and Leon Chernyak. Metchnikoff and the Origins of Immunity: From Metaphor to Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991; Alfred Tauber. The Immune Self: Theory or Metaphor? New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995; and Scott Podolsky and Alfred Tauber. The Generation of Diversity: Clonal Selection theory and the Rise of Molecular Immunology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Also formative for my thinking was Anne-Marie Moulin. La Dernier Language de la Médicine: Histoire de l’immunologie de Pasteur au Sida. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991. The best general history of immunology remains: Arthur M. Silverstein. A History of Immunology. San Diego : Academic Press, 1989.

4. The literature on public health measures is vast. For a wonderfully comprehensive treatment, see: Peter Baldwin. Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

5. Latour. Pasteurization. The original French title of this book Les microbes: guerre et paix suivi de irréductions underscores the militaristic implications of the metaphoric innovation more explicitly.

6. For example, Louis Pasteur. Oeuvres de Pasteur. Vallery-Radot , P. ed. Paris, 1922-1939. As for the cause of non-recidivism [a term Pasteur uses interchangeably with immunity] one can not refrain from the idea that the microbe, author of the malady, finds in the body of the animal a milieu de culture and that in order to satisfy its own life, it alters or destroys, which amounts to the same thing, certain materials whether it prepares them for its profit or burns them with the oxygen it borrows from the blood.

When complete immunity is attained, one can inoculate the most virulent microbe in whatever muscles without producing the least effect, which is to say that all culture becomes impossible in these muscles. They don't contain any food for the microbe. (305)

7. Elie Metchnikoff, "Sur la lutte des cellules de l'organisme contre l'invasion des microbes," Annals de L'Institut Pasteur, 1:7 (July 1887); Elie Metchnikoff, "La lutte pour l'existence entre les diverse parties de l'organisme." Revue Scientifique. 50:11 (10 September 1892); Elie Metchnikoff. Lectures on the Comparative Pathology of Inflammation. Trans. F. A. And E. H. Starling. New York: Dover. 1968; Elie Metchnikoff. Phagocytosis and Immunity. London: British Medical Association, 1891; Elie Metchnikoff. Immunity in Infective Diseases. Trans. Francis Binnie. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1905 [1901].

8. Metchnikoff. Lectures. 2-3.

9. Metchnikoff. Immunity. 176.

10. Metchnikoff, "Sur la lutte des cellules de l'organisme.” 326.

11. G.E.M. Anscombe. Intention. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.

12. Lawrence Kirmayer. “Mind and Body as Metaphors: Hidden Values in Biomedicine.” Eds. Margaret Lock and Deborah Gordon. Biomedicine Examined. Boston: Kluwer; 1988. 82.