Macrobiology and “War on Disease”

We can name under 'Macrobiology' those sets of ideas, organizations and medical efforts that are meant to fight the medical conditions that spread: on the infectious diseases, the communicable virus and phenomenon such as “mass hysteria.” The diseases afflicting mass social settings and common social behavior became an issue of concern. It was problematic that even if man within his own activities and his own conduct was “normal,” he could be afflicted by an infectious disease if society was in a health-care crisis, if society was “abnormal.” The communicable diseases became articulated as an injustice not from one man on another, but an injustice of nature upon all of mankind, of exploitative nature which attacked human societies. We can ask here why do we destroy nature? The ruthless, war-like spirit with which deforestation occurs is inspired by the idea that nature contains the communicable diseases that could kill off the human race. Our engagement with nature is still driven by our anger at the communicable diseases nature develops.

Communicable diseases give medical science institutions such as big hospitals a permanent place within society; these hospitals are there to wage wars against communicable diseases. The communicable diseases allow medical science a busy and constant involvement within society, and enable doctors to obtain high stature, a high stature which is only so stark in places rife with communicable diseases like Nepal. And a question must rightly be addressed to the 'big hospital' when communicable diseases do indeed spread in some societies.

In the past, there was a tendency in society to watch the spectacle of disease as it engulfed another, and let the body wither and die under the disease's command. There was no guiding ethic in human society to save the diseased body, and it was thought that the disease died with the body. There was no widespread belief in a kind of unconscious transmission of diseases, it was impossible for these societies to think that communication between humans could also take place outside of language. The only thing that transmitted between people, it was thought, was language. 

In a Lacanian sense, there was too much faith on the symbolic order as the order of language-based communication, and not enough attention was paid to the Lacanian Real, which is where nature is located, nature as the source of parasites and parasitic agents (microbes and viruses). Before Lacan, in anthropological writings, nature was imagined as big animals that behaved like humans, but a whole other, microscopic level of nature animates Lacan's writings. The invisibility and ineffability of the Real in Lacan's formulation can be interpreted as deriving from the Real's microscopic, bacterial nature, in that, that which is difficult to see and know is the Real. In biology, the Real was a parasite or a virus living off of language-based societies to stamp its authority upon humans. Because it is so authoritative, the Real is traumatizing in Lacan. 

In psychological phenomenon such as 'mass hysteria,' which are also of concern to biology, the Real is that unspeakable element that pervades through all the people and causes their collective hysteria. It is because of the presence of the Real that phenomenon like mass hysteria remain unexplained. As such, any time there is an indication or hint that a symptom or a condition in Lacanian psychoanalysis is not being explained fully, then we can find the presence of the Real's effects on these conditions, and indeed, Lacan's whole discourse is founded on the invasion of the Real upon human attempts at understanding and psychoanalyzing. The Real is that which invades on the symbolic and attempts to stamp its authority therein. 

It was with the idea of diseases stamping authority upon human society that first encouraged humans to challenge diseases. The objective was not to save the human life, but to wipe out the disease, the wish to fight the disease dominated over the wish to preserve man. And here we find how the most painful methods used to be commonplace within medical science because it was always the disease they were after, even if the diseased body suffered more from the “curative method” than it did from the disease.

To import the Foucauldian “construct live” and the medical-science concepts of infection and communication, a “philosophy of humanity” had to emerge, where the chief articulation was the concept of a common vulnerability and a common susceptibility of all humans to diseases and infections. Also emerged the idea of a sustained threat, something which couldn't be challenged but which would always be there, and that it was the human which would have to change and adapt. The virus is still out there, it is indeed a red flare which we live in and breathe, but we have found today a way to protect ourselves from the threat rather than to destroy the threat itself.

In the new philosophy, nature contained permanent threats, permanently threatening situations and organisms, and the goal was not to isolate some high-stature humans from nature, but to enable all humans to resist what was found in nature. This resistance of all humans to nature sounds like a philosophy of medical science which believes in the equality of all men and women before medicine, but the ways of resisting nature were developed not based on the idealist-romantic idea that all humans were equal, but that despite humans being unequal there was the risk of communicability of dangerous diseases between humans.