The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

Edges 129
role of medicine is to restore balance. By contrast, a qualitative concept
of illness (represented by Leriche’s medical research) suggests
that disease is a qualitatively different state than health, a different
mode of biological being altogether. The experience of disease involving
pain, fevers, and nausea is an indicator of a wholly different
mode of biological being, not simply a greater or lesser state of balance.
In this case, medicine’s role is to treat the symptoms as the disease
itself.
However, it is the third and last transition in concepts of illness
that is the most telling—what Canguilhem calls “disease as error.”
Molecular genetics and biochemistry configure disease as an error in
the genetic code, an error in the function of the program of the organism.
This is the current hope behind research into the genetic mechanisms
of a range of diseases and disorders from diabetes to cancer.
But what this requires is another kind of medical hermeneutics, one
very different from the patient’s testimony of the Hippocratic and
Galenic traditions, and one very different from the semiotic approach
of eighteenth - century pathological anatomy (where lesions on the
tissues are signs or traces of disease). The kind of medical hermeneutics
required is more akin to a kind of occult cryptography, a deciphering
of secret messages in genetic codes. Disease expresses itself not via
the patient’s testimony, not via the signs of the body’s surfaces, but via a
code that is a kind of key or cipher. The hope is that the TP53 gene is a
cipher to the occulted book of cancerous metastases, and so on. The
“disease itself ” is everywhere and nowhere—it is clearly immanent
to the organism, the body, the patient, but precisely because of this
immanence, it cannot be located, localized, or contained (and certainly
not in single genes that “cause” disease). Instead disease is an
informatic expression, both immanent and manifest, that must be
mapped and decoded.
The Paranormal and the Pathological II
One habitually associates epidemics with disease, and disease with
death. And for good reason; experience often shows the link between
disease and death, or at least between disease and a falling - away from