Viral ecologies: Refiguring ‘psychic immunology’,in the art of Helen Chadwick

Abstract

This article examines the artist Helen Chadwick’s 1989 digital montage series Viral Landscapes as an intervention in discourses of immunity circulating around the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the UK. The Viral Landscapes are unusual for art of this period in working closely with medical concepts and technologies, if only to problematise the ways in which these were mobilised. Strategically appropriating ideas of ‘psychic immunology’ emergent at the time, the work, I argue, formulates an affective ground for the extension of immunological responsibility beyond the confines of human bodies and societies. Through a close examination of the artist’s methods and the work’s aesthetics, I identify therein an alternative model of the subject from the closed bodily system and fixed identity presupposed by contemporary biomedicine. Influenced in particular by Deleuzo-Guattarian theories of machinic desire, as well as queer-theoretical constructions of the sexual subject as polymorphous, Chadwick’s model of the psychically immune subject seems to be grounded in a vital sexual energy, constructed through interpenetration by multiple, diffuse entities in ecological relation.

Introduction: Viral conditions

The crisis of HIV/AIDS in 1980s and ’90s Britain was not only a medical crisis of unparalleled proportions, it was also, as activist theorist Simon Watney voiced at the time, ‘a crisis of representation itself, a crisis over the entire framing of knowledge about the human body’ (1987: 9). To the extent that medical science was able to grasp the condition as ‘viral’, those infected were subject to a powerfully marginalising discourse of biological immunity, framed as a matter of national security. To the extent that the virus was resistant, at the time, to available medical treatment, those infected or deemed susceptible were ensnared in the purity discourse of a public health campaign largely built on the promotion of sexual abstinence.

The visual culture of this period was thus suffused, in the words of sociologist Jeffrey Weeks, with ‘a potent brew of religion and familialism’ typical of New Right ideology (1990: 133). At precisely the moment that Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 prohibited the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in the media and schools, the media were tasked with protecting the population from a virus that in many cases was sexually transmitted. The result was a campaign which, rather than destigmatising sexuality so as to promote safer sex, had quite the opposite discursive agenda. As photography theorist Roberta McGrath wrote in 1990, ‘nothing could be more sexless than public health’ (1990: 144).

If art of the 1980s and ’90s was to ‘look at AIDS’ counter-hegemonically, it would need to challenge the dominant representation of the condition on multiple discursive fronts: as a quasi-religious punishment for sexual deviancy, on the one hand, and as a scientifically naturalised immunological issue on the other. Though superficially at odds with one another, both presupposed and shored up the idea of an autonomous, individual subject of health who could be enjoined to defend against the virus through practices of behavioural modification. In this sense, and in line with the government’s simultaneous desecration of infrastructures of social care (see Klein, 2013: 133–134), the crisis of HIV/AIDS was distinctly neoliberal. The slogan ‘AIDS – you’re as safe as you want to be’, speaks to the Thatcher government’s typical outsourcing of risk to individual subjects in the name of personal choice.

While abstinence was perhaps the most obvious strategy of self-regulation installed in the common sense at this time, an increasingly prominent tool of self-protection in the medical sphere stemmed from the incipient discipline of ‘psychoneuroimmunology’. ¹ Since the 1960s, connections had been drawn in medical literature between the central nervous and immune systems, and in the context of HIV, research began to proliferate into the possible influence of psychological state on immune function. Phrases like ‘mind over virus’ (Gorman and Kertzer, 1990), and concepts like psychological ‘hardiness’ became a commonplace in medical discourse, (see Lichtenstein, 1995) emphasising the importance of patients’ self-management of stress for optimal immune function.

As McGrath (1990) pointed out at the time, what the saturation of Health Education material with self-management imperatives foreclosed was a public awareness of those factors other than choice that might affect a person’s health. It was this that activist currents in contemporary art sought primarily to address. The AIDS Photography Group’s ‘Ecstatic Antibodies’ project, for example, generated a cultural ground for the discussion of safer sex as a collective alternative to abstinence. As they, and other activist critics like Douglas Crimp saw the issue, the artworld had locked its practitioners into a sanitised mode, whose response to AIDS was limited either to raising money for medical research or cathartically invoking the ‘transcendence’ of lost lives, rather than politically critiquing this organised loss (1987: 3).

Yet while the reduction of art to medical fundraising certainly threatened to undermine its critical potential – risking coherence perhaps, with biomedicine’s individualising and pathologising tendencies – further medical research nevertheless remained a necessary demand of queer activism at this time. What this suggested was the additional need for an art that would continue to engage, albeit critically, with the immunological dimensions of AIDS discourse. If representations of safer sex could speak, in part, to the extra-medical politics of transmission, what might art have to say to the politics of immunity more broadly, including the immunological management of viral illness? Given the more immediate exigencies of safer sex campaigning at this moment, such questions have largely gone unexplored in histories of contemporary art.

This article examines the artist Helen Chadwick’s 1989 Viral Landscapes series as a significant, if less evidently ‘activist’, intervention in HIV/AIDS discourse – one that problematises medical knowledge, as it were, from within an exploration of its visual regimes. The Viral Landscapes are a set of five C-type prints that explore the inherently ‘viral condition’ of nature, merging images of the artist’s bodily cells, and marks made by the sea, with photographs of the Pembrokeshire coastline (n.d. A: 4). The works sought to deconstruct ideas of the viral as invader, as well as the immunitary ‘body as fortress’ (cited in Hana, 1991).

Central to my enquiry is the artist’s claim that she wanted ‘to create imagery that’s like a psychic immunology’ (cited in Hana, 1991). What is intriguing here is Chadwick’s desire to work with the terms of an individualising medical paradigm, while also wishing to ‘pose ecological questions’ about the stakes of the viral condition (n.d. A). What might it mean, I want to ask, to consider health or ‘protection’ in psychic-immunological terms that do not capitulate to the the medical and biopolitical rubric of boundaried, fortifiable bodies?

As I shall demonstrate, Chadwick’s contribution here stems from an extension of her investigation of immunity beyond the confines of human society. Among her annotated notes are copies of Félix Guattari’s 1989 ‘Three Ecologies’, in which the philosopher warns that:

Chernobyl and AIDS have brought us up sharply against the limits of humanity’s techno-scientific power and shown us what ‘kickbacks’ nature may have in store for us … One cannot blindly rely on the technocrats in the State apparatuses to control developments and minimise risk in these fields, which are, for the most part, ruled by the pursuit of profit (2000 [1989]: 42).

While the terms ‘control’ and ‘risk-management’ are problematised in this article, the animating force behind Guattari’s statement – namely the recuperation of life from ecological disaster – is evident, and evidently at issue for Chadwick (n.d. A: 5). Per Guattari, this is not a matter for technological determination, but necessarily for creative exploration.

Collapsed frontiers

Chadwick’s interrogation of nature’s ‘viral condition’ begins with the merging of a body and a very specific genre of visual topography. In requesting Pembrokeshire Coast Park as her site of work, her first artistic decision was to work with an unmistakeably militarised landscape. Requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence for military activity and NATO training, the coastline is marked by multiple fortified refuges and starkly drawn boundaries. Photographing this scene from various vantages, Chadwick created five photographic panoramas, which provide a backdrop and a frame for the work. It is into these that enlarged microscopic images of the artist’s cells are digitally immersed, along with abstract paint marks produced when she threw pigment into the sea and allowed it to sweep over the canvas.

Embedded in very backdrop of these images, then, is an iconography of security. As political scientist Mark Neocleous argues in Immunitary Politics (2022), security lies both at the heart of the political appropriation and application of biological immunity, and at the heart of the immunological absorption of political ideas. Central to this relationship is a core definition of immunisation as a form of the protection of life. If populations, according to the biopolitical logic, are bound by communitas or community, defined by the reciprocal sense of obligation (the Latin munus denoting an offering or duty), ‘immunity’ represents an exemption from the potential dangers of close cohabitation. Such ideas provide a justification for nationalist imaginaries that exclude any parties deemed ‘threatening’ from the protective affordances of the state while immunising others.

As reflected in Boffin and Gupta’s remarks on the ‘imagined community of the nation’, the crisis of HIV/AIDS sees an intensified marshalling of ideas of security when it comes to producing discourses of public health, at the expense of those most in need of protection. Gupta in particular identifies the need for a guilty population as the most prominent obsession marking public discourse and medical research, noting that the most politically acceptable choice of scapegoat had proved to be the ‘foreigner’ (1990: 103). In 1980s’ Britain, public health policy that made use of a general outsourcing of risk, bolstered by an ideology of individual responsibility, established a basis for the de-munisation of racialised and sexually pathologised ‘others’, meaning exclusion from the state’s protective function.

Chadwick’s summoning of the body into the topographical scene of militaristic defence reflects the transfer of this discourse between political and biological visions of the immune system. Sturken writes of the scientific discourse of immunology at the time as a science of ‘new frontiers’ (1997: 238), in which bodily interiors lose their fluidity and take on a static, defensive quality. In the 1970s, an economic preference for observability, recordability and predictability fuelled an increasingly detailed conceptualisation of the immune system in terms of a sophisticated internal network (see Federici, 2019: 187). Danish immunologist Niels Jerne, for instance, pioneered an understanding of the immune system less as a mere recognition of foreign material, than a dynamic of recognition and response within the self (see Jerne, 1974). Thus we hear of the immune system as a ‘home’ military organisation, boasting military-grade systems of transmission and decryption, always in the interest of protecting bodily sovereignty. Not only is the system internal, it is self-generated and self-sufficient (Sturken, 1997: 225).

If we attend to how Chadwick articulates a ‘body’ within the militarised Pembrokeshire Landscape, we see the frontiers begin to collapse. Having photographed the landscape itself, Chadwick worked with a doctor and pathologist to prepare glass slides of her own body cells, choosing the most interesting to photograph under the microscope. With the help of a technology company called Crosfield, she then had the transparencies scanned using a laser scanner, such that she could fiddle with colour and scale before merging the images synthetically. In this process of merging, she creates the effect of an encounter which, though perhaps violent, is difficult to parse in terms of invader and invaded, self-and other, interior and exterior. In Viral Landscape No. 5, a deep inlet cleaves what art historian Francis Frascina (2017) identifies as Saddle Head on the right of the image and Bosherstone Head on the left. Chadwick compares the composition of the landscape with the view of a body laid flat on the ground, as though the cliffs were in fact raised knees. One cannot say, to look at this image, if the sea is gushing out from between these legs, or whether it is rushing in. At the point where the waves crash together is a magnified kidney cell; it floats free in both scale and form from any received anatomical schema. ²

The scene of interpenetration radically departs from the era’s popular immune system photography. Perhaps the best-known visual-cultural references at the time came through photographer Lennart Nilsson, whose work was published in National Geographic, among other scientific journals and textbooks, as well as appearing in adverts, television programmes and the coffee-table book The Body Victorious (1987). Within this corpus of images are a number representing the body’s interaction with HIV, often ‘captured’ at the moment of ‘invading’ white blood cells. Sturken has referred to these images of the body as ‘horizonless landscapes’ (1997: 235), removed from the context of production with all its incisions, dissections and excisions. In reality, rather than being ‘captured’ as though by magic in a natural state of action, the cells at ‘work’ in The Body Victorious were preserved samples, strung together by the photographer in such a way as to produce a compelling story – a story, specifically, of conquest. ³ Into media characterisations of the immune system as a ‘high-tech war machine’ comes the extra-terrestrial image…

…most commonly pictured in stylized scientific illustrations that render it as a spherical shape with pronged exterior and coils (of RNA) at its center, a cartoonish symbol that often resembles a nuclear bomb. In these images the virus looks huge and lethal, as if it would explode if it dropped on one of its prongs, which tend to resemble detonators. The coils in the centre of the image have prompted some critics to describe it as a ‘grenade’ that would explode if the coil were pulled (1997: 240).

No such hallucinated grenade appears in Chadwick’s landscapes, which seem to beg similar questions to those that Donna Haraway poses of scientific photography’s horizonless, gutless landscapes of the body’s insides. Comparing such images of the immune system to scenes of outer space, Haraway asks, ‘in which direction is there an invasion? From space to earth? From outside to inside? Are boundaries defended symmetrically?’ (1991: 28). As she notes, expansionist medical discourse not only harbours an obsession with contagion, but in a ‘stunning reversal’, posits the colonised as the invader (1991: 28). Yet Chadwick’s images, rather than restoring any ‘authentic’ account of this relation, seem to dissolve the very categories in question – if there is no clear invasion, how to define the different actors on the scene? If the virus, as Chadwick suggests, is mere information, ‘which enters the body, affects the cells and changes them’ (n.d. A: 5), what kind of entry (if not invasion), what kind of change (if not damage), might it be possible to envisage? What manner of human response?

Non-human artistry

In an interview subsequent to the Viral Landscapes’ exhibition, Chadwick explained that she had ‘wanted to create imagery that’s like a psychic immunology’ (cited in Hana, 1991). The term is perhaps surprising in light of her effort to disturb the iconography of the virus as a thing-to-be-controlled. Psychic immunology, at its medical origin, stems directly from models of the body as a closed internal system, namely a complex neurological system of bodily self-control in contrast to what literary scholar Albrecht Koschorke calls the ‘contagious and miasmic “local traffic”’ of the body as part of a social or ecological environment (2008: 483). The introduction of the psychoneurological into immunology begins with understandings of the immune system as a ‘thinking’ structure that distinguishes itself from the nonself, memories cell material, recognises newly foreign matter and responds to prevent infection. Indeed, it is from here that we get this idea of a military organisation with the ‘cognitive’ capacity to decipher codes. Where this develops in the 1970s is into a model of the subject whose conscious thoughts might bear an influential relation to this internal thinking system – in other words a more properly immune subject.

By the mid-1980s Candace Pert, a leading medical researcher in the field, had declared the conceptual division of immunology, psychology and neuroscience a ‘historical artifact’ (1985: 824). By 1987 the discipline of ‘psychoneuroimmunology’ had its own journal, Brain Behaviour and Immunity, a landmark for the new cognitive paradigm. As I have outlined above, one of the central affordances of this cognitive paradigm was to posit illness as receptive not only to the biological control of medics, but also to the medically assisted self-control of individual patients – neuroplasticity, it was proposed, could play an important role in healthy immune function. In visualisation self-help, processes of healing are imagined in a deeply relaxed state so as to ‘gain more control in many senses’ (See Haraway, 1991). While the medical utility here is self-evident, thinkers like Haraway have critiqued such practices as ‘lucrative terrains of self-development, a scene where contending forces of power are evoked and practiced’ (1991: 31). In the ideal of a psychologically self-immunising subject we find the construction of what philosophers of biopolitics describe as ‘homo immunologicus’ – responsible for controlling his body so that society needn’t be concerned with him. ⁴

There is certainly a technics of control embedded in Chadwick’s artistic process for constructing her Viral Landscapes. Working in the mode of expanded photography, Chadwick consciously labours the technological enhancement of the work’s figurative material. There is, in the first instance, her appropriation of medical technologies for the isolation and capture of cell material; then her manipulation of colour and scale with the assistance of the laser scanner. On the left-hand side of each Viral Landscape, a swatch of block colour contextualises the ‘scheme’ of digital pigmentation she has used for that work. To achieve a panorama in which disparate elements could come together on a single surface, Chadwick was explicit about needing access to ‘information in a liquid state’, ‘infinitely manipulable, unlike in a conventional montage’ (n.d. A: 2).

Yet it would be rash to connect this manipulative method with the work’s vision of psychic immunology. There is certainly an interest, here, in manifesting the role of conscious of effort – of art and artifice – in human relations with the viral, yet this is by no means a total aesthetic in the finished work, nor is it necessarily meaningful as a normative description of this relation. Given her sympathy with the Deleuzo-Guattarian critique of technological responses to ecological ‘kickback’, it seems important to consider the work in parallel with contemporaneous critiques of digital regimes of visuality. A ‘Virtual Seminar on the Bioapparatus’ held in 1991 moved a number of scholars to speculate on the risks posed by such regimes to humans’ relationship with nature at that time. The artist Char Davis, for instance, argued that technologies of virtual reality forged from the desire to manipulate nature risked obliviating users to nature’s ongoing colonisation. Tantalising us with ‘even more power and control than we have as a species already … [they] offer us’, Davis remarked, ‘an escape from an increasingly desecrated planet into the clean orderly world of our minds’ (Richards and Tenhaaf, 1991: 16). Davis identifies in three-dimensional computer graphic tools a means of return to the Cartesian visual paradigm, privileging such conventions as objective realism, linear perspective and gridded space. The challenge for artists, then, becomes the use of such tools in ways that subvert, rather than reaffirm, the human desire for mastery.

It is interesting, in view of this, that Chadwick’s original idea for the work, titled ‘anatomical landscapes’ did have a certain vision of self-mastery at its core. Her early notes for the project, handwritten under the heading ‘THE ANATOMIES’ focus on the cell as a ‘discrete body enclosed by membrane that separates it from “environment” (i.e. like human in landscape)’ (n.d. B) Her lexicon of deconstruction here (ana-temno in Greek denoting a ‘cutting up’) is documented in her notes alongside a concern to ‘reconstruct in memory (mind)’. Echoing the popular fusion of cognitive discourse and an imaginary of total self-regulation, Chadwick seems to venerate the human body as the ‘apotheosis of adaptive mechanisms’, noting its ability to ‘maintain itself in changing + hostile environment’. ‘Body matter is moulded to 3D blueprint’, she writes, ‘controlled/masterminded by the CNS-mind’ (n.d. B).

As Chadwick’s preparations for the work develop, however, we witness an incursion into this delusion of total self-prepossession – an incursion that comes through Chadwick’s physical encounter with the landscape itself. Reflecting on this encounter, Chadwick described looking out at the sea and having the ‘specifics of … personality’ all but ‘washed away’:

I began to feel that these slippages between your own boundaries and the boundaries of the sea and the land allow everything to become fluid. Your state of consciousness takes you out of your body into rhythms that are fundamental and primary (n.d. A: 2).

It was here that Chadwick’s interest in the viral – as something impersonal, boundary-troubling, psychically altering? – began to take root. She was changed by her immersion in the landscape, just as viral information changes the organism it ‘enters’. As art and architectural historian Stephen Walker has observed, Chadwick’s engagement, through the Viral Landscapes, with the specific interaction of cells and viruses, called into question her earlier preoccupation with the self-sufficiency of the cell, positing its boundary as porous, ‘where contents from each side of this boundary always already infect each other’ (2013: 150). The boundaries between land and sea, body and environment, she observes, correspond to different concentrations of the organic and the chemical, yet these are troubled by the introduction of a virus, something between these two orders of substance (Chadwick, 1989: 97). Contra the traditional posture of human ‘stewardship’ of nature, a person cannot preside over what always already penetrates them. Similarly, how to handle one’s cells in the encounter with viral ‘information’ if it is not possible to do so in the manner we might deal with chemical or organic matter, i.e. through conscious processes of control?

It was perhaps in order to open herself to such questions that Chadwick decided to allow the waves to collaborate on the work’s aesthetic composition. As she discovered that the body could not be described without reference to its viral condition, so did she conclude that she could not artistically explore subjectivity without reference to a ‘third element’ (n.d. A: 2). Going down to meet this third element – namely, the sea – Chadwick threw pigment into the water, letting the sea swirl it back over her canvas. These ‘wave paintings’ as she called them, are translated into archipelagos of colour on the surface of the Viral Landscapes, introductions of an energetic potential extraneous to the artist’s calculations. Subverting the computer’s supposed privileging of Cartesian space, grounding variables in a grid of constants, Chadwick superimposed networks of blue-tinted wave marks as ‘floating forms in suspension’, unmoored from linear perspective and too diffuse for quantification. Her use of pixel replacement technology to merge these marks with the landscape and cellular matter has less of the regulating effect ascribed to technical manipulation than it submits the image of the body to an element of unpredictability.

Staging this confrontation between the ‘self’, the Pembrokeshire landscape and the sea, Chadwick infuses a scene of superficial mastery with the complicating factor of non-human agency. In Viral Landscape No. 5, this superficial scene is particularly stark. Crowning the horizon is the outline of a ring-fenced radar station, signalling all the built intentions of a military ‘operation’. Our gaze is nevertheless drawn to the nexus of cells and sea – a violent clash around which we witness a wild proliferation of forms. Faced with the evidence of human desire to carve the landscape into a defensive structure, we sense the contrary impulse to surrender to the sea’s erotic force. As Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton wrote of these works on first exhibition, self and other are represented at a moment of ‘prolific encounter’, in which ‘the living integrates with the other in an infinite continuity of matter’ (Chadwick, 1994). It is the potential of this encounter, more complex than military strategy or biomedical knowledge is wont to capture, that opens Chadwick’s engagement of the landscape to new discursive possibilities.

Where Nilsson offers the landscape as a blank space in which the body might assert itself, Chadwick proposes the landscape as both vulnerable to the body, and an unpredictable machinic space for bodily transformation. Indeed, Chadwick’s imaginary reflects a system in a process of continual refiguration. As such, rather than dismissing her interest in psychic immunology on the grounds of her more obvious interest in problematising ‘control’, we might instead probe the potential of her viral encounter with the landscape to reconceptualise this very term. Methodologically, the Viral Landscapes transform the artistic subject from one defined by cognitive mastery to one of sensory openness. How might this openness, as it shapes the work, stir us to rethink the ‘psyche’ in psychic immunology, and/or its relation to the self? And need we locate the ‘self’ within the system of immune cells, or in something more expansive?

Sympathetic systems

We have already seen how the multi-directional dynamics of the Viral Landscapes undermine the understanding of an immunological ‘self’ as the subject of a boundary invasion. Part of the force of this effect derives from an aesthetic that troubles the very existence of such boundaries. Nilsson’s ability to render the virus ‘both monstrous and foreign’ (Sturken, 1997: 242) in his photographs derives, in part from his use of colourisation, which isolates viral particles from immune cells via dramatically contrasting tones. While Chadwick uses similar techniques in her Viral Landscapes, vividly colouring magnified swatches of her own bodily tissue in such alien tones as ‘rubber glove pink’, these unnatural chromatic accents do not separate one kind of entity from another, but rather ricochet between the various elements (Chadwick, n.d. C). Cells, land, sea, ‘sea paint’ are tonally linked, even as the overall impression in the work is one of extensive variation.

This sense of linkage is not just tonal, but also morphological. In Viral Landscape No. 2, cells from Chadwick’s ear are colour-matched with a spiralling wave drawing. The shape of this drawing, in turn, bears a striking resemblance to the labyrinthine structure of the inner ear, an image of which is reproduced in Chadwick’s copy of the Colour Atlas of Histology (Craigmyle, 1986). In the ‘atlas’, this image sits beside a description of the interconnected, fluid-filled chambers and canals through which the sound of waves reaches the sensing body. In the sea’s replication of the shape of a sensory organ, and Chadwick’s redoubling of this connection through her use of colour, we sense the co-presence of the organ’s structural boundedness with the fluidity of that which moves through it – sound waves and literal waves, external ‘others’ that activate the self.

In these aqueous resonances, the work calls upon knowledge paradigms from premodern Western medicine, whereby the human body was conceived of less as a self-regulating system than a network of sympathetic linkages with entities outside itself (see Siegel, 1986). The doctrine of the ‘humours’, or bodily fluids associated with antique pneumatology located sense perception not on the bodily surface, but rather in encounter with material and corporeal ‘effluences’ – animal, environmental, or perhaps spiritual. Koschorke describes this as a process corresponding to the original meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ – ‘a chemical phenomenon involving the steady influx and reflux of materially diffuse fine particles’ (2008: 472).

This diffusion of particles seems to increase as the Viral Landscapes progress from No. 1 to No. 5. While the bottom half, below the horizon, of No. 1 is certainly filled with the liquid beginnings of a more vaporous diffusion of spots, Viral Landscape No. 5 is suffused with blue wave marks right across the landscape. The highly fragmented rock surfaces that mount the grassy cliffs further add to this ‘particulate surface’, as does the spray of white droplets that rises from the crash of sea against stone. Similarly, Viral Landscape No. 4 has tiny specks of orange and blue sweep almost the entire panorama. In rendering this increasingly kinetic dispersal of liquid particles and cells, Chadwick evokes precisely the ‘effluvian zone’ the Enlightenment had sought to ‘dry up’ (2008: 473).

Shifting Chadwick’s focus away from the self-sufficiency of the anatomical cell, the sprawling Viral Landscapes speak more closely to alternative understandings of the immune system as composed of a vast array of components that mediate between a body’s cells and multiple forms of environmental matter and information. As Haraway wrote in 1991: ‘The hierarchical body of old has given way to network-body of truly amazing complexity and specificity. The immune system is everywhere and nowhere. Its specificities are indefinite if not infinite’ (1991: 22). It is into this infinite range of possibilities, it seems, that Chadwick floats the possibility of sympathetic linkage, begging the question of what is at stake in suggesting such a model of the subject.

In evoking sympathy, rather than warfare, as the basis of the subject’s relation with its environment, the aesthetics of fluidity and diffusion depart from the economical relationship to circulating fluids established by modern medicine. Indeed, AIDS-era anxieties about the sexual sharing of fluids echo Enlightenment-era reactions to such antique healing practices as bloodletting and masturbation. While it had once been the body’s insides that were considered the potential site of harm, and the doctor’s task to expose this body to the healing elements outside of it, Enlightenment medicine reconceived the source of threat as located in the sphere of external pathogens, rendering ‘health’ a matter of endogenous self-protection (see Koschorke, 2008: 472). In line with this model of the body, the ‘psychic immunology’ of 1980s medicine was far from the kind of ‘feeling’ process that admitted of sympathetic linkage with entities external to the self. Rather, it was a matter of neurological self-management, to be achieved through cognitive processes acting directly on internal immune cells.

What might it mean, then, to reconsider the immunological subject as constructed through a more interpersonal, ‘emotional’ kind of connectedness? There is a resonance here with Silvia Federici’s proposal that we understand the ‘neuro’ in psychoneuroimmunology less in terms of the scientific ‘nervous system’ than on the affective plane of ‘nervousness’. Yet to make such a move would be to trouble the idea of psychic immunity as guaranteeing protection. ‘If ‘nervous feelings’, as Federici puts it, are constantly interacting with and effecting changes in the immune process, ‘their plasticity connotes explosiveness as well as malleability, a destructive capacity to annihilate and not just adapt’ (2019: 297). There is indeed a threatening energy in Chadwick’s swarming representations of the so-called ‘viral condition’ – a sense of danger in the submission to an encounter with the unpredictable sea. It is a danger she tethers, unashamedly, to sexual desire. ‘There’s something about the way the water meets the land’, Chadwick wrote in her notes, ‘that has an erotic quality’ (n.d. A: 4), suggesting that the body, through its own sensory receptivity, might be vulnerable to desires extraneous to the will towards self-defence.

The political stakes of this suggestion are worth exploring in greater detail. For in thus linking the erotic with the viral, does Chadwick not risk reinscribing the scapegoating of sexuality for a crisis of public health? As I shall argue in what follows, it is not, in fact, the concern of a non-biopolitical art to purify or absolve sexuality from its implication in danger. Rather, it is to engage with, and possibly reformulate, the discursive and aesthetic conditions that make it possible to operate through scapegoating in the first place. If the neoliberal condition is defined, in part, by its distribution of risk to marginalised individuals and communities, what kind of redistribution of viral risk – in other words, what kind of immunology – might make space for, even proceed from, the demands of sexual desire?

‘Everything penetrating everything’

Of central concern to Chadwick is not just to interrogate the boundaries of self and nonself, but more specifically the crystallisation of selves around certain conceptions of gender and sexuality. The Viral Landscapes' refusal of directionality is not simply a refusal of immunological categories of invader and invaded, but simultaneously of gendered constructions of activity and passivity. ‘Occasionally the sea appears to be taking an active role, and occasionally it’s reversed’, Chadwick writes, inviting us to share her conclusion that ‘gender is reversed, you can’t really say that one element is male and the other female’ (n.d. A: 4).

The proposition is perhaps starkest in Viral Landscape No. 4, in which the artist’s cervical cells cluster around the head of an inlet. Red and blue arteries and veins, mingling ‘hot and cold’ blood according to the artist’s preparatory notes, flank the cervical tunnel between two cliff faces. Chadwick’s notes on the finished works are concerned with the ‘ambiguous gender’ of cells to the naked eye. ‘Released from the bonds of form and gender’, she writes in Enfleshings, ‘flesh is volatile and free to wander in an aetiology of complete abandon’ (1989: 97). Her emphasis on the ungendered eroticism of water meeting land, stripped of the rubric of ‘incursion’, speaks to a certain utopianism around gender, repeated throughout her commentary on the work. ‘The idea of everything penetrating everything’, she writes, ‘could be a transcendent one, almost a religious one’ (n.d. A: 5).

Yet as Crimp so powerfully put it in 1987, ‘We don’t need art to transcend the epidemic; we need to end it’ (1987: 13). To connect this statement with the ‘transcendence’ of gender-based sexual identities, there is an important case to be made for the recognition of queer identity as a precondition of struggle against the state’s marginalisation and abandonment of queer subjects. Hence the AIDS photography group’s concern with gathering practitioners from ‘a broad spectrum of those citizens of the actual communities who have been ignored by the state’s emphasis on the “imaginary” community: women, Blacks, lesbians and gay men’ (Boffin and Gupta, 1990: 4). As gender theorist Judith Butler would propose soon after the Viral Landscapes’ exhibition, while there remained a need to ‘question rigid dichotomies of gender, challenging core assumptions of identity politics’, there was also a need for wariness of ‘understanding the realm of fantasy and representation as a domain of “psychic free play”, unencumbered by relations of social power’ (Kotz, 1992: 82).

Chadwick’s own rhetoric aside, it would be difficult to call the Viral Landscapes a domain of free play, set free from the aesthetics of gender. As noted by Frascina (2017, n.p.), the parallel headlands that form the topographical base of Viral Landscape No. 4 represent ‘the most direct visual correlation of flat, straight legs of the female “body as site”’. In a landscape that mirrors the site of the female reproductive organs, Chadwick painstakingly recapitulates the squamous epithelium found at the entrance to her own womb. While destabilised by the diffuse and multi-directional aesthetics of the ‘viral encounter’, gender’s visual codes remain expressly discernible here. Rather than a refusal of gender, in that case, we might view this treatment as more like a partial and strategic mobilisation of gender’s signifiers. For Butler, the exigencies of sexual marginalisation require neither a disavowal of gender nor a reversion to purely rhetorical identity politics. Rather, the question becomes: ‘how to use [the sign] in such a way that its futural significations are not foreclosed? How to use the sign and avow its temporal contingency at once?’ (1993: 311–12).

In line with this agenda, Chadwick’s aestheticised abstraction of sexuality might be viewed as a kind of strategy in the untethering of sexual identity from blaming discourses of social contagion. When she writes of flesh ‘released from the bonds of form and gender’, she writes of an errantry that ‘cannot be a pathological condition in a moralising space’. Here, she insists, in a ‘scenario of mutual being’, ‘the ideals of purity, and thus contagion, no longer apply’ (1989: 97). What we see is far from the either the medical or media cleansing of sex from the image of immunity, but rather a cleansing of moral discourse from the image of sexuality.

Chadwick’s refusal to dispense with sexuality in her exploration of ‘psychic immunology’ reflects an alternative evaluation of what constitutes ‘life’ to that of the biopolitical gaze. The latter would dispense with sexual pleasure, particularly among its ‘deviants’, if it would guarantee greater longevity or survival among the population at large. There is, of course, a certain risk involved in rejecting this governmental calculus, yet one that must be embraced if our vision of life is one untrammelled by social hierarchy and/or animated by sexual vitality. In Leo Bersani’s 1987 essay ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ the queer theorist refers to Freud’s speculation ‘that sexual pleasure occurs whenever a certain threshold of intimacy is reached, when the organization of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective processes somehow “beyond” those connected with psychic organisation’ (1987: 217). This idea of ‘organisation’ might summon not only the biopolitical effort to organise sexual abstinence, but equally psychic immunology’s attempt to organise the mind. To the extent that these modes of self-management entail a disavowal of aggression, a repression of dangerous urges, we might align them with the repression of sexual aggression that Freud saw as central to the project ‘civilization’. While Bersani is critical of the civilising force as a product of evolutionary conquest, one that turns aggression in on the self, he is also, with Freud, circumspect about the protective force of this masochistic process. It is, on the level of a certain conception of the body politic, an ‘immunological’ process, a withdrawal of the self from the site of intimacy in defence against the risk of inflicting harm on others.

In Freud’s view, consolation for these masochistic measures is offered by civilisation in the form of ‘oceanic feeling’ – a zealous, perhaps childish, sense of ‘oneness’ with the world that helps to soothe the thwarted desire to destroy (see Freud, 2014 [1930]). For Chadwick, however, the ‘oceanic’ seems to present both a site of immunological healing and an invitation to re-encounter the sexual, that ‘shattering’ of the self against which civilising forces are wont to protect. She writes:

[As] the living integrates with other in an infinite continuity of matter … [t]he story of susceptibility is reinscribed, affirmed in new dynamic rhythms as a counter-offensive to the terminal association of sexuality and disease. Spliced together by data processing, these are not ruined, catastrophic surfaces but territories of prolific encounter, the exchange of living and informational systems at the shoreline of culture (1989: 97).

Chadwick’s aim with the Viral Landscapes is to refigure sexuality, and gender as a site of sexual difference, ‘not as damage but as potential’. What potentials might open up, the work invites us to ask, were we to reframe our susceptibility to one another? What would it mean for immunology were we to embrace this susceptibility and relinquish the idea of the medical as a purified and purifying zone?

In Chadwick’s vision of virality we find not merely a refusal of defensive imaginaries of the immune subject, but what’s more an exploration of the unrealised possibilities of those desires that exceed defensive imperatives. In their treatment of both sexuality and immunity as diffuse, mutable and ecological processes, the Viral Landscapes take up what Watney perceives to be the epistemic potential of homosexuality itself, ‘For the gay man is truly polymorphous’ (Chadwick underlines this word three times in her copy of Policing Desire). ‘He does not need the defensive refuge of an identity rooted in exclusive models of domination and submission which can never make adequate sense of his psychic and physical mobility’ (1987: 28). In this sense, we might read these landscapes not, to use Haraway’s terminology, as ‘spatialised maps of normalised functions’, nor as ‘highly mobile fields of strategic differences’ (1991: 15), but rather as highly mobile fields for the strategic sublimation of difference.

Conclusion: Gentle deterritorialization

To the extent that the Viral Landscapes live up to Chadwick’s desire to visualise a kind of psychic immunology, what the works allow us to imagine is a model of the subject remarkably different from that which psychoneuroimmunology, as a medical field, presupposes. I am talking of a model predicated less on a closed bodily system or fixed identity than a vital sexual energy, constructed through interpenetration by multiple diffuse entities in an ecological relation. While such a model admits of no easy therapeutic solutions when it comes to the treatment and prevention of illness, what it does is redistributes the model of responsibility naturalised by medical and governmental discourse. What it provides is therefore a starting point for rethinking solidaristic routes to health beyond individual practices of self-management.

For Chadwick, it is not therefore enough simply to shift the signifiers of the virus from the moral to the medical. There are, after all, no discursively ‘neutral’ bodily tissues. Instead, the Viral Landscapes disturb the very system of signification through which both morality and medicine are weaponised. While there is meaning to be drawn from the blurring of forms, diffusion of elements, and troubling of gendered signs, more powerful still is how these landscapes conduct the swirl of diffuse living matter into an enveloping assemblage.

Chadwick’s hanging instructions for the set of five panoramic panels are important here, tending as they do towards an immersive experience for the viewer. The artist requested that the same pale yellow cover the three walls on which the pictures would be mounted, as well as on the opposite wall, ‘so space is completely enclosed in specific colour’ (n.d. D). Whether an individual panel plunges us between precipitous cliffs, has us assaulted by rushing waters or swoops to surround us in a vaporous fog, the viewer of the series as a whole is encased on all sides. We are caught in a psychic maelstrom, at the boundary of seduction and fear, that would mock any pretence to a ‘psychic immunology’ insensitive to the sensory or sexual. It is not just the body that presents itself here as the bridge between cognition and affect; it is the whole ecological network that makes, and is made by, the desiring immune subject.

There is, then, a certain deterritorialisation in Chadwick’s attempt to suspend the ‘meanings’ typically associated with the viral, or more accurately to lift understandings of the viral above the sphere of meaning-transmission to that of interactive meaning-production. As Guattari is at pains to point out, each experiment in the suspension of meaning represents a kind of risk – ‘the risk of too violent a deterritorialization, destroying the assemblage of subjectivation’ (1989: 11). The Viral Landscapes, in all their menacing ambivalence, are haunted by such risk. Yet as we have seen, it is not risk itself from which Chadwick seeks to disentangle the idea of the viral. In delinking the viral from socially violent discourses of contagion, Chadwick is attuned to the social dynamics with which risk becomes loaded in the context of neoliberal Britain. The question is one of where, or to whom, the burden of risk is allocated.