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Visual Objects and Universal Meanings: AIDS Posters and the Politics of Globalisation and History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Claudia Stein  and
Roger Cooter
Claudia Stein
Affiliation:
Dr Claudia Stein, History Department, Warwick University, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. Email: [email protected]
Roger Cooter
Affiliation:
Professor Roger Cooter, The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, UK. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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Drawing on recent visual and spatial turns in history writing, this paper considers AIDS posters from the perspective of their museum ‘afterlife’ as collected material objects. Museum spaces serve changing political and epistemological projects, and the visual objects they house are not immune from them. A recent globally themed exhibition of AIDS posters at an arts and crafts museum in Hamburg is cited in illustration. The exhibition also serves to draw attention to institutional continuities in collecting agendas. Revealed, contrary to postmodernist expectations, is how today’s application of aesthetic display for the purpose of making ‘global connections’ does not radically break with the virtues and morals attached to the visual at the end of the nineteenth century. The historicisation of such objects needs to take into account this complicated mix of change and continuity in aesthetic concepts and political inscriptions. Otherwise, historians fall prey to seductive aesthetics without being aware of the politics of them. This article submits that aesthetics is politics.

Keywords

AIDS PostersGlobal HistoryGlobalisationHamburg Museum für Kunst und GewerbeHistoricismLocalismModernityMuseologyNationalismPolitics of AestheticsPostmodernismVisual Language
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 85 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 ‘Transnational’, ‘international’ and ‘world’ are frequently used as synonyms; to avoid confusion we use ‘global history’ throughout this paper.

2 See Thomas Zeller, ‘The Spatial Turn in History’, German Historical Institute Bulletin, 35 (2004), 123–4; Denis Cosgrove, ‘Landscape and Landschaft. Lecture delivered at the “Spatial Turn in History” Symposium German Historical Institute, February 19, 2004’, German Historical Institute Bulletin, 35 (2004), 57–71; Doreen Massey, For space (London: Sage, 2005); George G. Iggers and Q. Edward Wang, A Global History of Modern Historiography (London: Pearson/Longman, 2008).

3 Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual After the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.) The Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 1998); idem, An Introduction to Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1999); Barnard Malcolm, Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture, (Houndsmill: Palgrave, 2001); J.A. Walker and S. Chaplin, Visual Culture: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2003); Sarah Pink, The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). On the application of visual culture studies to historical study, see Gerhard Paul, Visual History: Ein Studienbuch (Berlin: Vendenhoech & Ruprecht, 2006); Monika Dommann, ‘Vom Bild zum Wissen: Eine Bestandsaufnahme wissenschaftshistorischer Bildforschung’, Gesnerus, 61 (2004), 77–89; on the ‘pictorial turn’, coined by W.T. Mitchell in 1992, see Sybilla Nikolow and Lars Bluma, ‘Science Images: Between Scientific Fields and the Public Sphere’ in Bernd Hüppauf and Peter Weingart (eds), Science Images and Popular Images of the Sciences (London: Routledge, 2008), 33–51: 36.

4 See, for example, Valeska Huber, ‘The Unification of the Globe by Disease? The International Sanitary Conferences on Cholera, 1851–1894’, Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 454–74; cf. Hans Zinser, Rats, Lice and History: Being a Study in Biography (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1935); William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977).

5 See, for example, Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (eds), Picturing Science, Producing Art, (New York: Routledge, 1998); Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, ‘Visual Representation and Post-Constructivist History of Science’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 28 (1997), 139–71; Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007); Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995; Nick Hopwood, ‘Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud: Ernst Haeckel’s Embryological Illustrations’, Isis, 97 (2006), 260–301; Bert Hansen, Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Bernard Lightman, ‘The Visual Theology of Victorian Popularizers of Science: From Reverent Eye to Chemical Retina’, Isis, 91 (2000), 651–80; Ann Shteir and Bernard Lightman (eds), Figuring it Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2006); Hüppauf and Weingart, op. cit. (note 3).

6 For example, on the condom as a material object, see Nicole Vitellone, Object Matters: Condoms, Adolescence and Time (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). For more historically focused studies on scientific and medical objects in global contexts, see Simon Schaffer, ‘Instruments as Cargo in the China Trade’, History of Science, 44 (2006), 217–46; Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

7 Throughout this paper we use ‘AIDS posters’ as shorthand for ‘HIV/AIDS posters’. This is the generic terms used by vendors, collectors and exhibiters for posters relating not just to AIDS, specifically, and the need for precautionary measures such as condoms, but also, to issues such as homophobia. Our use of ‘poster’ follows Harold Hutchinson, The Poster: An Illustrated History from 1860 (London: Studio Vista, 1968), 1: ‘[E]ssentially a large announcement, usually with a pictorial element, usually printed on paper and usually displayed on a wall or billboard to the general public.’ However, the meaning of ‘the public’ in this connection was to some extent challenged by AIDS posters (see below note 72).

8 Felix Studinka, ‘Foreword’ in Poster Collection: Visual Strategies Against AIDS, International AIDS Prevention Posters (Zurich: Museum für Gestaltung Zurich and Lars Muller Publishers, 2002), 5.

9 For illustrations of AIDS posters see: Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein, ‘Protect Yourself’ in Public Health Campaigns: Getting the Message Across (Geneva: World Health Organisation, 2009), 66–88; Hugh Rigby and Susan Leibtag, HardWare: The Art of Prevention (Edmonton: Quon Editions, 1994); Becky Field et al., Promoting Safer Sex: A History of the Health Education Authority’s Mass Media Campaigns on HIV, AIDS and Sexual Health, 1987–1996 (London: Health Education Authority, 1997); Becky Field and Kaye Wellings, Stopping AIDS: AIDS/HIV Public Education and the Mass Media in Europe (London: Longman, 1996); Jürgen Döring (ed.), Gefühlsecht: Graphikdesign der 90er Jahre (Hamburg: Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, 1996); Edition Braus, ‘Aids Plakate International Bildsammlung 1985–1997’, a CD-ROM produced by Stiftung NeoCortex for Medizinische Fakultät der Universität, Basel (n.d.); and the websites of the institutions mentioned below (note 16) holding the largest collections of AIDS posters.

10 Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein, ‘Coming into Focus: Posters, Power, and Visual Culture in the History of Medicine’, Medizinhistorisches Journal, 42 (2007), 180–209.

11 Constance Classen and David Howes, ‘The Museum as Sensescape: Western Sensibilities and Indigenous Artifacts’, in Elizabeth Edwards, C. Gosden and R. Phillips (eds), Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 200.

12 Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (eds), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

13 We do not therefore engage here with the claim made by various theorists, that it is now impossible to talk of AIDS/HIV without referring to mutually metaphorised models and theories of globalisation. According to some, it is now impossible to even conceptualise ‘globalisation’ without also thinking in terms of the AIDS pandemic. See Dennis Altman, ‘Globalisation and the AIDS Industry’, Contemporary Politics, 4 (1998), 233–45; Richard Brock, ‘An “Onerous Citizenship”: Globalisation, Cultural Flows and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 44 (2008), 379–90.

14 Cf. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, Gabriel Rockhill (trans. and intr.), (London: Continuum, 2006). Throughout this paper we adhere to the crucial distinction established by Paul Forman between ‘postmodernism’ as a body of thought critical of modernity from ‘postmodernity’ as an era in which we still live. Further, we follow him on the fallacy of thinking the former the cause of the latter: ‘(Re)cognizing Postmodernity: Helps for Historians—of Science Especially’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 33 (2010), 1–19.

15 We reflect on this problem in another paper: Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein, ‘Visual Imagery and Epidemics in the Twentieth Century,’ in David Serlin (ed.), Imagining Illness : Public Health and Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

16 The Wellcome Library, London; the Library of the National Institute of Health, Bethesda, Maryland; and the Deutsches Hygiene Museum, Dresden. A collection of 625 AIDS posters from 44 countries is held at UCLA, and can be accessed online: http://digital.library.ucla.edu/Aidsposters/. There is perhaps another paper to be written on the interior politics of such purchases within economic climates of retrenchment, and on the demands this then places on the kind of advertising deployed for the exhibitions—in the Hamburg case a website image of a punchy young woman conveying gender and alternative life styles—and on the actual display of the objects in the interest of maximising the public passing through the turnstiles. This is not our concern here, though it might be noted that financial stringencies connect to the contemporaneous articulation of a wider problematic on the purpose and function of museums internationally, on which see James Cuno, Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

17 Designed by Yossi Lemel of Israel and photographed by G. Korisky, 1993, reproduced in Döring, op. cit. (note 9), 145.

18 The black-and-white photo entitled ‘Final Moment’, by the American photographer Therese Frare, appeared in Life in November 1990. See Oliviero Toscani, Die Werbung ist ein lächelndes Aas, Barbara Neeb (trans.), (Mannheim: Fisher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000), 58; and Cooter and Stein, op. cit. (note 10); and idem, op. cit. (note 15).

19 On the past and present ambiguous status of the condom as both a legal and morally approved hygienic product, and as an illegal and morally disapproved means to birth control, See Paula Treichler and Kelly Gates, ‘“When Pirates Feast…Who Pays?” The Pirate Figure in Trojan Brand Condom Advertisements, 1926–1932’, unpublished paper presented at the American Association for the History of Medicine 83rd Conference, Rochester, Minnesota, 30 April 2010, and see http://www.chicagohumanities.org/en/Genres/History/2010-History-of-the-Condom.aspx, accessed 12 October 2010. See also Vitellone, op. cit. (note 6).

20 Döring, op. cit. (note 9), 13. The 1996 exhibition was partly organised around HIV/AIDS; its other three themes were ‘Heads’, ‘Bodies’ and ‘Human Rights’.

21 The 1896 exhibition took place three years before Roger Marx formulated the idea for such exhibitions in the journal Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, and proposed a Musée moderne de l’Affiche illustrée: Margaret Timmers (ed.), The Power of the Poster (London: V&A Publications, 1998), 12–13. On the late nineteenth-century poster movement in Germany, see Jeremy Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany 1890–1945 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 30. Aynsley mistakenly dates the Hamburg exhibition as 1893 (p.31), and misattributes Das Moderne Plakat by the curator of the Dresden Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (1897) as the first German book on posters (pp.31, 35; the first such being that by Justus Brinkmann cited in note 23 below).

22 For cultural politics in Hamburg and Brinckmann’s role as a patron of the arts, see Carolyn Kay, Art and the German Bourgeoisie: Alfred Lichtwark and modern painting in Hamburg, 1886–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); on Brinckmann, see Heinz Spielmann, Justus Brinckmann (Hamburg: Ellert und Richter, 2002).

23 Justus Brinckmann, Katalog der Plakat-Ausstellung: Hamburg 1896 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Hamburg: Lütcke & Wulff E. H. Senatsbuchdruckerei, 1896), 92. Similar motives lay behind ‘Mr Robert Newman’s Promenade Concerts’ (later known as the ‘London Proms’) to bring ‘quality’ music to the masses at low cost (1 shilling per concert), the first of which was held in August 1895. For contemporary expression of similar views in Germany and Britain, see Detlef Hoffmann, ‘The German Art Museum and the History of the Nation,’ in Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff (eds), Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 3–21; and Seth Koven, ‘The Whitechapel Picture Exhibition and the Politics of Seeing’, in Sherman and Rogoff, idem, 22–48. A further part of the purpose of poster exhibitions was to educate people to the technology of graphic design. For example, in 1931, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Exhibition of British and Foreign Posters asserted that ‘this Museum is concerned less with the economic aspect, the publicity value, of the poster than with its technical method and the artistic impulse which finds expression in the special means employed. From a Museum point of view, therefore, this Exhibition of Posters might almost equally well be described as an exhibition of lithographs and of lithographic technique.’ Quoted in Timmers, op. cit. (note 21), 19.

24 On the systematic collection of posters by national institutions as evidence of democratised and populist culture, and as challenge to the traditional arts, see Aynsley, op. cit. (note 21), 30ff, and Jim Aulich and John Hewitt, Seduction or Instruction?: First World War Posters in Britain and Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 11–34.

25 Döring, op. cit. (note 9), especially 187.

26 ibid., 13–14.

27 ibid., 13.

28 Interview 26 July 2010.

29 Interview (CS) with the assistant curator of the exhibition, Hendrik Lunganini, 21 June 2006.

30 Richard Hollis, Graphic Design: A Concise History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994); Jeremy Myerson and Graham Vickers, Rewind: Forty Years of Design and Advertising (London: Phaidon Press, 2002).

31 Döring, op. cit. (note 9), 15. Such comments—including the idea of Zeitgeist—are strikingly resonant of those on ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazis; see Stephanie Barron (ed.), ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry Abrams, 1991).

32 Döring, ibid. Another way to interpret these views is in terms of ‘epistemic virtues’, as elaborated by Daston and Galison, op. cit. (note 5). As Daston and Galison insist, within the culture of science and in cultural more generally, old epistemic virtues are never simply discarded or confronted head-on by new ones, but rather, are retained often long after the creation of new ones.

33 Döring, ibid., 16.

34 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

35 For Sontag’s intellectual and political context, see Sturken and Cartwright, op. cit. (note 3), 151–78. On the Frankfurt School, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–50 (London: Heinemann, 1973).

36 Susan Sontag, ‘Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity’, introductory essay to Dugald Stermer, The Art of Revolution: 96 posters from Cuba (London: Pall Mall Press, 1970), vii–xxiii: viii. The following comments on Sontag are drawn from Cooter and Stein, op. cit., (note 10), 188–90.

37 Sontag, ibid., viii.

38 ibid., vii.

39 ibid., viii.

40 Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (London: Penguin, 1990), 75ff.

41 For a critique of Sontag’s use of the metaphor of disease, see Allan Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 193, n.7; idem, ‘Emerging Themes in the History of Medicine’, The Milbank Quarterly, 69 (1991), 199–214: 204.

42 For the images and historical commentary, see http://www.avert.org/his87_92.htm.

43 Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media, [1987] 3rd edn (London: Cassell, 1997), 15–16.

44 A good account is provided by Matt Cook, ‘From Gay Reform to Gaydar, 1967–2006’ in Matt Cook et al. (eds), A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages (Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007), 179–214.

45 Cook, ‘The 1980s Backlash’, ibid, 204–14. Commenting on this backlash, Watney, op. cit. (note 43), 18, quotes Dennis Altman, ‘“the risk to gay identity seems greater in countries such as Great Britain and the Irish Republic, where the gay movement has less legitimacy and seems less able to withstand a new ideological onslaught, backed by real fears and dangers.” We are now facing that onslaught… which threatens not only our health but our very social identity, as the term “gay”, wretched away from the older pejorative discourse of “homosexuality”, is reloaded before our very eyes with all the familiar connotations of effeminacy, contagion and degeneracy.’ On representations of gay men in the UK media at this time, see Keith Howell, Broadcasting It: An Encyclopedia in Film, Radio and TV in the UK, 1923–1993 (London: Cassell, 1993).

46 See, for example, the AIDS posters reproduced in Sander Gilman, Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1995), 124–8.

47 For a statement on how Western medicine achieved and sustained this ‘Biblical’-like position in the twentieth century, see David Armstrong, A New History of Identity: A Sociology of Medical Knowledge (London: Palgrave, 2002). For how it lost it through the debate over HIV as the cause of AIDS, see Joan H. Fujimura and Danny Y. Chou, ‘Dissent in Science: Styles of Scientific Practice and the Controversy Over the Cause of AIDS’, Sociology of Science and Medicine, 38 (1994), 1017–36; Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Subsequently, it was biomedicine in general, rather than the medical profession in particular, that came to define ‘life’—see Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

48 See Cooter and Stein, op. cit. (note 15).

49 The campaign cost 70 million US dollars. See Torsten Sevecke, Wettbewerbsrecht und Kommunikationsgrundrechte: Zur rechtlichen Bewertung gesellschaftskritischer Aufmerksamkeitswerbung in der Presse und auf Plakaten am Beispiel der Benetton-Kampagnen, (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Band 14, 1997), 24.

50 Joan Gibbons, ‘Reality Bites’, Chapter 4 of Art and Advertising (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 75–96.

51 The reactions were overviewed in ‘Benetton—Advertising History’ entry for 1992, online: http://www.ucad.fr/pubgb/virt/mp/benetton/pub_benetton.html, accessed 16 March 2003. See also Döring, op. cit. (note 9), 128–9. The Guardian was forced to defend itself in an editorial of 24 January 1992; see Lorella Pagnucco Salvemini, United Colours: The Benetton Campaigns (London: Scriptum Editions, 2002), 92–3.

52 Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (London: Flamingo, 2000), 279–309; Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam: How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge—and Why We Must (New York: HarperCollins, 1999). The term ‘culture jamming’ was coined in 1984 by the San Francisco audio-collage band Negativland.

53 The image is reproduced in Francis Beckett, ‘Protest Politics’, AIDS Matters, 8 (1992), 5.

54 Klein, op. cit. (note 52), 281–2.

55 Watney, quoted in Gilman, op. cit. (note 46), 115; see also ‘The Rhetoric of AIDS: A Dossier Compiled by Simon Watney, with Photographs by Sunil Gupta’, Screen, 27 (1986), 72–85; Douglas Crimp, ‘Portraits of People With AIDS’ in Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

56 Paula A. Treichler, ‘AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification’, Cultural Studies, 1 (1987), 263–305: 263–4. The essay is reprinted in her How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).

57 ‘“It’s Prejudice That’s Queer”—Questions and Answers: For Internal Use by CHAPS/THT Staff Only’, Terrence Higgins Trust internal memo, cited by permission of the Terrence Higgins Trust.

58 On the increasing disconnection of the global marketplace from national politics, see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Allan Lane, 2007); Ulrich Beck, Was ist Globalisierung? Irrtumer des Globalismus—Antworten auf Globalisierung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007)—who regards ‘the global’ as forwarded by liberal democracies in the course of their decline as politically autonomous nation states; John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World (London: Atlantic Books, 2005); Arjun Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalisation and the Research Imagination,’ in idem (ed.) Globalisation, Durhan and (London: Duke University Press, 2001), 4.

59 See Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 1–12.

60 Watney, op. cit. (note 43); for biomedicine’s role in this, see Michael Lynch, ‘Living with Kaposi’s Sarcoma and AIDS’, Body Politic, 88 (1982), 31–7.

61 Watney, ibid.; Philip Gatter, Identity and Sexuality: AIDS in Britain in the 1990s (London: Cassell, 1999), 82ff; Virginia Berridge, AIDS in the UK: The Making of Policy, 1981–1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 56.

62 Berridge, ibid., shows that over the twenty-odd years since the syndrome first surfaced in the UK, there were at least four distinct phases to those power relations and their representations.

63 Peter Baldwin, Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); see also Cristiana Bastos, Global Reponses to AIDS: Science in Emergency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (New York: Hyperion, 2000); Colleen O’Manique, Neoliberalism and AIDS Crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa: Globalisation’s Pandemic (London: Palgrave, 2004).

64 Elizabeth Pisani, The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS (London: Granta, 2008).

65 For instance, at the XVI International AIDS conference on 14 August 2006, Bill Roedy, the Chairman of Global Media AIDS Initiative—also President of MTV Network International—gloated over the public relations benefits to industries involved in such work. ‘Media have such a huge role to play in this fight’, he said, ‘and as a member of the media industry I can fully admit we’re not doing enough. (applause). Media can actually be a force of the good. When is the last time you have heard media can be a force of the good? Well, here media can be a force of the good.’ Online: http://www.kaisernetwork.org/health_cast/uploaded/files/081406_ias_media_transcript.pdf, 11.

66 Ong and Collier, op. cit. (note 12), 3.

67 Treichler, op. cit. (note 56), 263.

68 ‘World Health Organization Launches Public Information Effort to Increase Global Awareness of AIDS’, WHO Press, Press release WHO/15, 27 May 1987. Welcome Library. The message has been annually reiterated since December 1988 when the WHO initiated ‘World AIDS Day’.

69 By 1988, when AIDS and its Metaphors was first published, Sontag could observe that at international congresses ‘the global character of the AIDS crisis was a leading theme’, and add wryly that in these forums ‘the rhetoric of global responsibility’ was naturally ‘a specialty’: Sontag, op. cit. (note 40), 91.

70 While media multinationals came largely to constitute the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS, established in 1996), other giant multinationals-turned-philanthropic organisations, such as Gates and Viacom, in their independent AIDS programmes came to spend far more money than the UNAIDS: T. Tannen, ‘Media Giant and Foundation Team Up to Fight HIV/AIDS’, Lancet, 361, (26 April 2003), 1440–1; UNAIDS, ‘The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS)’, 12 August 2005, online: http://www.thebody.com/uniads/unaidspage.html.

71 On the ‘semantic hegemony’, see Beck, op. cit. (note 58).

72 The former are not necessarily places more ‘public’ than the latter. Many AIDS posters, contrary to the impression lent them through exhibitions such as that in Hamburg, were never seen outside of gay pubs, clubs and toilets—and some were one-offs produced only for art shows. We only begin to think they were ‘public’ because the specific groups to whom they were often targeted are dissipated in the archive or in the museum. Implicitly in these places—designed, of course, for preserving ‘public memory’—a new composite public is assembled for them. On the vicissitudes and contradictions of ‘the public’ see Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005). On memory and history, see Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

73 For these politics in the practice of contemporary science, see Daston and Galison, op. cit (note 5), ch. 7: ‘Representation to Presentation’, 363–417.

74 William H. McNeill, ‘The Rise of the West after Twenty-five Years’, Journal of World History, 1 (1990), 1–21.

75 See, for example, James M. Blaut et al., 1492: The Debate on Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and History (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1992); and Barry Gills and William R. Thompson (eds), Globalisation and Global History (New York: Routledge, 2006).

76 Exemplifying this trend is the global historian, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ‘Global History, Methods and Objectives’, paper presented to the Polyphonic History Seminar, Madrid, 22 January 2008. On the effects of the postmodern turn in medical history, see Roger Cooter, ‘After Death/After-“Life”: The Social History of Medicine in Post-Postmodernity’, Social History of Medicine, 20 (2007), 441–64; Roger Cooter, ‘The Turn of the Body: History and the Politics of the Corporeal’, Arbor Ciencia, Pensamiento cultura, 186 (2010), 393–405.

77 Chris Hables Gray, Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age (New York: Routledge, 2001), 17.

78 Martin Kemp, Seen/Unseen: Art, Science, and Intuition from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2. For Kemp, who seeks to reconstruct ‘some continuities and discontinuities between past and present’, history stands for itself, rather than a product of its times.

79 Aruf Dirlik, ‘Confounding Metaphors, Inventions of the World: What is World History For?’ in Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (eds), Writing World History, 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 91–133: 92.

80 Ibid., 91