Introduction: Scary Germs
In 1995 I had to watch this video as a little kid and I still remember the nightmares it gave me of AIDS actors lumbering around in fuzzy red costumes and goofily malevolent scowls. This HIV bogeyman was the “perfect model of malice” as it waited to assimilate costumed T-cell people (Hofstadter 31). Perceiving viruses as enemies of humanity is just one manifestation of a fearful paranoia that germs and infectious diseases have instilled into society since the end of the Cold War (Knight 177). The metaphors utilized by paranoid conspiracy theories of bodily invasion and destruction of the self by a “replicative Other” (Preston 50) become actualized by the biological realities of viruses and bacteria . This lends a grotesquely horrific fear to microbiological discourse: for instance, in the widely-read book The Hot Zone, Richard Preston graphically describes symptoms of Ebola infection, including the “infective, lethally hot” vomit that is mixed with “fresh red arterial blood,” and he also zealously describes how “the connective tissue in” the face of Marburg virus victims “dissolves…as if the face is detaching itself from the skull” (Preston 12).

Preston’s vividly horrific imagery transfixed and fascinated the public, but when actual electron micrograph pictures of viruses and microbes in action emerged in the mid 80’s, a “face” had been given to the enemy (Jaret 1986). Public perception could now rally against something that seemed distinctly, inhumanly other. The leader of a World Health Organization team described the Ebola virus as a “gorgeously wrought ice castle,” while T4 bacteriophages are regularly described to biology students as resembling a “spaceship” (Preston 84, Kutter 2007). This terminology paints viruses as alien, but keeping a castle-like totality that can still be comprehended. Such language is easily interpolated into a paranoid style that regards microbes as “free, active demonic agents” that seek to “undermine and destroy a way of life” with their “almost transcendent power” (Hofstadter 29).

Paranoid Language and its Effects on Discourse
This connotative language turned into a militarized vocabulary evident even in scientific research and pedantry, which Peter Knight suggests was due to decades of Cold War containment tropes (Knight 175). The body is a “fortress” that must be defended from viral assailants ; “infantry” divisions of the body’s own immune system function as “magnetic mines” that can “perforate hostile organisms so that their lives trickle to a halt” (Jaret quoted in Martin 53), and viral research labs are onioned within multiple zoned layers of walled security complete with “negative air pressure so that if a leak develops, air will flow into the zones” (Preston 42). The paratext of Preston’s book even imitates these security measures, as if the mere knowledge of viral history contained within is itself dangerous . His book also follows exclusively military biohazard specialists, with its veterinarian researcher heroine Nancy Jaax being, not incidentally, also a Colonel in the U.S. Army.

That Preston’s book finds it necessary to completely militarize immunological research firmly places it among the paranoid literature of viruses and disease. It is not alone; an entire genre of swashbuckling, virus-hunting, non-fiction thrillers exists in the same vein, including Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague . Despite biologists’ disclaimers that evolution is not a teleological process but rather a phenomenon whose adaptations are always firmly made for the present moment (Wetzer 2007), narratives like Preston’s make evolution sound like it is a historical “motive force,” as if the Ebola virus navigated “its own evolution through unknown hosts and hidden pathways in the rain forest” to arrive at just the amount of potent lethality needed to eradicate us in a war which Laurie Garrett says “we are losing” (Preston 46, Garrett 1). Hofstadter considers this emphasis on a “motive force” and its common manifestation in “apocalyptic terms” as definitive for the paranoid style (Hofstadter 29).

Language, Paranoia, and Psychology
But can we really consider virus panic to be an instance of paranoiac thought or conspiracy theory where nature is the enemy? Preston suggests that viral disease is the “revenge of the ecoforest,” and the jargon used to name viruses by their original sites of incidence has left us with a databank full of viruses named after river tributaries and jungles such as Ebola Zaire – as if the river itself boarded a plane to knock on our door and take us out (Preston 44). Why does the industrially technological first world so readily regard nature and its microbes as enemies? Peter Knight suggests that this Manichean romanticization is a “compensatory fantasy of the heroic achievements of medical science in an age when once vanquished diseases are returning” (Knight 193). This “compensation” is reminiscent of Jacques Lacan’s ideas about the “narcissistic…mode of identification” that “determines the formal structure of man’s ego and of the register of entities characteristic of his world” (Lacan 110). The ego was shattered to begin with; it is fragile, vulnerable, and fearful of germs. The war-like dialectic that pits humans against nature’s microbes is itself a paranoid compensation to “bolster a sense of individual or collective identity” (Knight 179). But something else yet resides.

The fear that viruses and microbiological disease agents generate comes not only from the perception that the enemy “other” is so apparently different, “foreign and hostile,” (Martin 53), but also because in a more subtle way it is difficult to say how different it is at all – it may very well “erode the distinction between self and other at a cellular level” (Knight 178). While the “heart” of the immune system rests in “the ability to distinguish between self and nonself,” autoimmune diseases like AIDS and other rapidly replicating viruses have taken away this comfortable certainty, leaving the line between self and non-self uncomfortably hazy (Martin 53). Even Preston at times seems unsure of whether to treat the thing “making copies of itself inside” victims as a parasitic other, or if instead through an infectious transformation of body cells into virus particles it “is attempting to convert the host into itself,” leaving the victim’s cells no longer exactly his or her own (Preston 10, 13).

This wrinkle in the self/nonself distinction represents the “discordance with one’s own reality” that constitutes the imperfect ego as Lacan sees it (Lacan 95). In reaction to this inability to comprehend oneself as the whole, unified “ideal-I,” misrecognition resulting in paranoia happens – but in this case, instead of a “secure paranoia” that clearly distinguishes self/nonself and compensates for an identity problem, this misrecognized paranoia results from an identity problem. As Knight says, “in an unstable world” the body is “simultaneously the only thing that can be trusted, and the source of our worst nightmares” (Knight 185).

The proliferation of additional conspiracy theories regarding the origin of disease represent attempts to scapegoat anything other than our own bodies. These conspiracies include homophobic arguments blaming gay men for AIDS, (Knight 194), the fear that a sinister government bent on eradicating minorities engineered microbial diseases as bioweapons, (Knight 200, Harper and Meyer 17-18), and even accusations that a “pharmaceutical-industrial” complex is deliberately running a scare campaign to drive up profits (Knight 200, Duesberg 443). While some of these have more merit than others, they can all be thought of as paranoid styles utilized to mask the self/nonself insecurity.

This is not to say that viruses aren’t scary or that diseases like Ebola Zaire are not, in fact, “slate wipers” – they are. But the point where fear crystallizes and becomes paranoia is mediated by what is essentially the usage of one kind of paranoia to fix another. Distinguishing between the two is as much an exercise in self/nonself distinction for critical theory as it is for the cellular mechanisms of disease, and we may require a new way of apprehending our immunological health if we want to move beyond of a post-Cold War rhetoric of neverending “low intensity conflict” (Knight 175).

Works Cited

Garrett, Laurie. The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

Harper, David and Andrea Meyer. Of Mice, Men, and Microbes: Hantavirus. San Diego: Academic Press, 1999.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Jaret, Peter. “Our Immune System: The Wars Within,” National Geographic, June 1986, 702-35.

Knight, Peter. Conspiracy Culture. London: Routledge, 2000.

Kutter, Elizabeth. Personal interview. June 2007.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1999.

Martin, Emily. Flexible Bodies. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Preston, Richard. The Hot Zone. New York: Random House, 1994.

Wetzer, Regina. BISC 120: Introduction to Biology Lecture. Taper Hall of Humanities 101, University of Southern California. Los Angeles, CA. November 2007.

Stein, Bob. Keynote Address. Computers and Writing Conference. Union Club Hotel, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. 23 May 2003.