Paper
The Immune System in Control Societies: Geopolitics and Immunomodulation in Contemporary Biomedical Settings
presenters
Márcio Vilar
Nationality: Brazil
Residence: Germany
Freie Universität Berlin
Presence:Face to Face/ On Site
Keywords:
Immunomodulation, control societies, established biomedicine, geopolitics
Abstract:
My proposal, in this paper, is to provide an investigation into the question of whether the contemporary standard immunosuppression-based treatments for autoimmune diseases (such as arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, Sjögren syndrome etc.) can be seen as co-constitutive of what Gilles Deleuze conceptualized as ‘societies of control’. For decades, immunosuppressants as careers of this particular therapeutic model increasingly spread as promissory biotechnological innovations within and from the Global North to other countries, in which established biomedicine plays a major regulatory role. In Brazil, for instance, their most expensive forms are subsidised by the government and available at its public health care system. Yet, they remain standing only as palliative resources for such diseases, for which a cure, officially, has never been announced.
Besides a multiplicity of research materials that I use to conduct my investigation, I mobilize and interpret primarily those ones co-produced through conference attendances of biomedical events, which occurred mostly during the Covid-19 pandemics in multiple places, and medical literature. Among others, my points of reflection include: A) the recurrent biomedical enunciations of such diseases as chronic, and related tension between their simultaneous distinctiveness and inseparability from each other as variations of autoimmunity (as the inversed version of immunity); B) the emphasis on the necessity to keep their symptoms under control through modulation, including those still not manifested, after a pre-emptive logic, and; C) the splitting of people into dividuals capable of harming themselves on molecular level (too).
Since I argue that it might make sense to answer positively to the guiding question presented above, I then speculatively explore potential intersections between immunomodulation and contemporary geopolitics.