Shielding Power: Early Formulations of the Immune Self

Speaker: Professor Maebh Long, Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Otago 

Modernity is a time of immunity, of social systems governed by immunitary logics of closure, retreat and defence. Across political landscapes there is an increasing emphasis on borders, boundaries, and what we can symbolically call the fear of being touched. This fear of contact has led to new nationalist rhetorics that present globalisation as a mode of contamination. Legal systems have been mapped as modes of immunising society against threat, while governance structures have been reconfigured around a biopolitics of immunitary life. In the public sphere, discourses of boosting or biohacking immune systems sit alongside anxieties about pandemics and vulnerabilities to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The modern human being is homo immunologicus, Peter Sloterdijk’s coining of an identity whose defining feature is its striving to shield itself against every perceived threat. The modern self, then, is increasingly conceptualised as an immune self, or, perhaps more accurately, a self that should be more immune.  

And yet, since Niels Jerne moved from Frank Macfarlane Burnet’s 1940s coining of the immune self to posit the networked immune system in the 1970s, there has been a growing body of work that sees the immune system not as an armed border patrol fending off the different, but as that which facilitates a flexible, adaptative, relational interaction between the body and its environment. Andrea Grignolio et al posit the “liquid self” that flows between self and non-self states, Scott F. Gilbert and Alfred I. Tauber stress symbiotic relationships within immune functioning, and Tauber’s recent reflections on immune identity insist on porosity and interaction with the environment.  

Although historians of science have mapped the story of immunology from its earliest prehistories through the discipline’s beginnings in the major discoveries by Louis Pasteur, Élie Metchnikoff, and Paul Ehrlich in the 1880s and 1890s, scholars interested in discourses of immunity have tended to concentrate their readings of immunitary logics on the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with their earliest engagements, outside of quick surveys of the term itself and its connections with variolation and vaccination, usually beginning with the end of Second World War. In this talk, I offer socio-political detail to the histories of immunology and an early history to the theorisations of immunitary logics. I present the findings of research on the discursive patterns and conceptual implications of narratives of immunity in newspaper advertising in Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These four sites are island nations connected by the linguistic overlaps, cultural similarities, entangled histories, trade routes, and colonial fractures created by the British Empire. The sites reveal patterns of immunitary thought quite antithetical to fluid, environmentally-engaged mappings, any formulations of “co/immunity” or “commune systems”. From the early, public-focused, commercially-driven scene of immunity the advertisements reveal we can trace the long embedding of a modern self alone, bounded and striving for isolation, even in a crowd.