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PIVOTAL STUDIES IN
THE GLOBAL AMERICAN LITERARY IMAGINATION
SERIES EDITORS: DANIEL T. O’HARA · DONALD E. PEASE

Immunity’s Sovereignty
and Eighteenth- and
Nineteenth-Century
American Literature
Rick Rodriguez
Pivotal Studies in the Global American
Literary Imagination

Series Editors
Daniel T. O’Hara
Temple University
Philadelphia, PA, USA

Donald E. Pease
Department of English
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH, USA
This series will present new critical perspectives on the histories and lega-
cies shaping the divergent visions of America in the world within literary
texts. Texts that re-envision America and its relationship to the larger
world, in ways other than exceptionalist, will provide a point of critical
focus for these cutting edge scholarly studies. Using the unique format of
Palgrave Pivot to make an incisive intervention into current scholarship,
the stress in these books will be on how American literary texts have and
continue to contribute to the reformation of the vision of America in the
world from roughly the antebellum period to the present. As “transna-
tional” approaches to scholarly production have become mainstream,
Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination considers the
complexities of such an appropriation and, instead, develop alternative
global perspectives.
All American genealogies from the New England preeminence through
the mid-century modern cold war consensus to post-modern dissensus,
transatlantic, global/transnational turns (and counter-turns) would be
tapped and the word “American” in the title will include all of North
America. All critical perspectives would also be welcome, so long as the
focus is on the question of how the texts and subjects discussed bear on
the question of the global American literary imagination. Finally, the
authors will demonstrate how to read their chosen texts, revealing the
ways these new interpretations foster informed critique and revised critical
methods.
Books published within this series should fall within the Pivot length
limits of 25,000–50,000 words.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15082
 Rick Rodriguez

Immunity’s
Sovereignty and
Eighteenth- and
Nineteenth-Century
American Literature
Rick Rodriguez
Baruch College
New York City, NY, USA

Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination

ISBN 978-3-030-34012-4    ISBN 978-3-030-34013-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34013-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
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This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgments

This project was made possible by the generosity of many people to whom
I’m immensely grateful. At Loyola-Chicago, my cohort at the Americanists
Reading Group brought crazy smarts and great cheer to our meetings,
where many of the ideas for the project initially took shape. My thanks to
John Schlueter, Ann Mattis, Bill Malcuit, Kristen Egan, Zachary Lamm,
Shelly Jarenski, Doug Guerra, and to the crew at Northwestern: Peter
Jaros, Sarah Mesle, Katy Chiles, Sarah Blackwood, and Cole
Hutchison. Chris Castiglia guided the dissertation and encouraged by
example writing for the tenth draft—a practice that continues to inform one
of the things I enjoy most about this profession. Jack Kerkering and Paul
Jay read generously and critically and pushed for clarity and precision.
Carina Pasquesi heard and read the whole thing more than once and
would not let anything slide. I could not have asked for a better interlocu-
tor during those walks. She’s one of a handful of ideal readers I want to
surprise with my work. At Baruch, friends and colleagues helped me navi-
gate the busy life of an assistant professor at CUNY. Michael Staub,
Carmel Jordan, Bill McClellan, Grace Schulman, Harry Brent, John
Brenkman, Peter Hitchcock, Sean O’Toole, Allison Deutermann, and
Stephanie Hershinow shared practical strategies, sage advice, and warm
collegiality. Ana Ramos-Zayas, Matt Eatough, Don Mengay, Tim Aubry,
and Jessica Lang gave generously of their time and read parts of the proj-
ect when it (and I) needed it most. The support and mentoring of my
Department Chair, Jessica Lang, made all the difference, especially in the
final stretch. At Palgrave, Donald Pease, Daniel O’Hara, Allie Troyanos,
and Rachel Jacobe were a delight to work with as the book made its way

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

through production. The love of the Rodriguez clan sustains me,

always. And finally to Justine, Angel, and Orangina, whose infectious joy
knows no immunity and without whom this would certainly mean less,
this book is dedicated.
 Contents

1 Immunity’s Sovereignty  1
Chapter 2: The Haitian Exception  13
Chapter 3: Algerian Captivity and State Autoimmunity  14
Chapter 4: Poe and Democracy’s Biopolitical Immunity  14
Chapter 5: Cuba and the Imperial Solution  15
Chapter 6: Panic Room  16
Works Cited  17

2 The Haitian Exception 19

Louisiana: Haiti Redux?  23
Flirting with Revolution  27
Committing to Empire?   36
Works Cited  42

3 Algerian Captivity and State Autoimmunity 45

Freedom’s Captives  47
What’s So Funny About Algerian Captivity?  52
The Elusive Rogue  58
Works Cited  69

4 Poe and Democracy’s Biopolitical Immunity 71

Romantic Finitude  72
Poe’s Nothing That Is  75
Works Cited  91

vii
viii CONTENTS

5 Cuba and the Imperial Solution 93

Consolidation and Expansion  96
Freedom Bound 101
Feeling Right Makes Might? 109
Works Cited 120

6 Panic Room123
Works Cited 131

Index133
 CHAPTER 1

Immunity’s Sovereignty

Abstract This chapter develops the concept of immunity in relation to its

formulation in critical theory and political philosophy, particularly in the
work of Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito. The chapter goes on to
identify immunity as the animating concept in the discourse of American
exceptionalism, which informs national identity vis-à-vis intense global
contact and conflicts with such geopolitical sites as Haiti, North Africa,
and Cuba.

Keywords Immunity • American exceptionalism • American literature

• Roberto Esposito

A sense of their own vulnerability sends the city’s elite rushing to find
shelter in the Prince’s palace, leaving those outside its walls exposed to the
ravages of the plague. Thinking themselves secured against the worst of
the contagion, the city’s well-to-do citizens go on to enjoy their exemp-
tion from risk in an orgy of music, dance, and drink. But their enjoyment
is never free from the anxiety haunting their new intra-mural existence. At
the stroke of midnight the revelers become conscious of their mortality
and fearful that they have walled themselves in with the plague, and before
the Prince or his guests can determine if the palace walls were built high
or thick enough to keep contagion out, one after the other, starting with

© The Author(s) 2019 1

R. Rodriguez, Immunity’s Sovereignty and Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-
Century American Literature, Pivotal Studies in the Global American
Literary Imagination, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34013-1_1
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2 R. RODRIGUEZ

the Prince, they all drop dead: “And Darkness and Decay and the Red
Death held illimitable dominion over all” (Poe, “The Masque of the Red
Death: A Fantasy,” 490).
Edgar Allan Poe’s grim fantasy of state immunity is a provocation for
readers to think not just about what is at stake for citizens when the state’s
reaction to an emergency reproduces the lethal conditions that brought
the rationale for immunity into being in the first place, but also, and per-
haps more significantly, what can happen when immunity becomes soci-
ety’s reigning political paradigm. The first of these propositions folds into
the more encompassing logic of the second. In the first instance, immu-
nity is conceived as a reaction determined by the contingencies of emer-
gency situations, of which there may be many in the history of any society,
as well as effective and ineffective state responses to such situations. In the
second, immunity stands in apposite relation to a permanent state of emer-
gency whose now-temporality subsumes the randomness of contingent
crises into a chronic condition demanding permanent state intervention.
“No pestilence,” the story insists, “had ever been so fatal, or so hideous.”
Unique in the scope of its devastation, the plague functions in the story as
an unabated disaster in search of a countervailing agency capable of
addressing the emergency in its totality. As such, Poe’s plague figures not
purely as an external threat but as a negation inhabited by its opposite.
Death meets its Prince in a zone of indiscernibility where distinctions
between inside-outside, culture-nature, life-death, self-nonself, prince-­
plague are inscribed into one another. Framed this way, the state of emer-
gency (Red Death) and the sovereign state (Prince) stand not just in
opposition but in dialectical relation to one another, with the two, if not
quite vying for “illimitable dominion,” certainly creating the conditions
that give that specific conclusion a sense of inevitability. This is to say that
if the story can be read as a dramatization of immunity’s lethal dimension,
it can just as well be interpreted—considering the prospect of the plague’s
illimitable reach—as an extended metaphor for the state’s justified deploy-
ment of its powers of immunization under extreme circumstances. Both of
these readings underscore the story’s broader implication that a perma-
nent state of emergency invariably results in immunity becoming society’s
common-sense logic. Under such conditions, ordinary democratic proto-
cols for public deliberation and debate are more likely to be preempted by
the state’s imperative to preserve life, and what’s left of liberty, justice and
politics, at all cost. This is not to say that this line of thought goes unques-
tioned in American culture, then or now, nor that immunity forecloses
 1 IMMUNITY’S SOVEREIGNTY 3

democracy tout court. At a time when the boundaries and borders of a

nation-state-in-the-making functioned less as impervious walls and more
as permeable frontiers, many U.S. writers dramatized the conflicts and
contradictions resulting from what they perceived as the defining vulner-
abilities of an expanding democracy faced with the prospects and perils of
such events as the expansion of territory and commerce beyond the
nation’s existing borders, the immigration of peoples with traditions and
ideas sometimes at odds with republican and democratic values, and the
management of intractable citizens and colonized and enslaved subjects
with their own ideas about how best to pursue happiness. Foregrounding
immunity’s role in the formation of U.S. political culture allows us to track
the development of its capacity to identify and neutralize threats as well as
the unintended consequences of its introjection of risk. Taking Poe’s prov-
ocation as its point of departure, this book identifies the concept of immu-
nity as constitutive of democratic culture in the U.S. as the newly
independent nation struggled to assert its place within the world economy.
By inverting the order of terms in the well-known concept of sovereign
immunity I don’t mean to suggest that the success of the American
Revolution did away with the juridical doctrine that insulates the crown or
the modern state from wrongdoing. State immunity protects modern
states from being subjected, without their approval, to the jurisdiction of
another. Rather than negate sovereign immunity, immunity’s sovereignty
describes a condition whereby the state and its biopolitical apparatuses
reproduce themselves and expand their reach in response to the nation’s
exposure to internal and external threats imperiling the lives of citizens
and the nation’s integrity. This book reexamines flashpoint events in U.S.
history in order to analyze the causes and consequences of immunitary
responses to some of the nation’s early states of emergency.
Devoid of the protection the British Empire afforded its colonies, the
U.S. found itself subject to foreign and domestic threats, constituting a
series of emergencies that imperiled its independence. Wars with North
African regencies, responses to the Haitian Revolution, reactions to the
specter and reality of slave revolt in the antebellum South, and plans to
acquire Cuba to ease tensions between the states constituted immunizing
responses that helped define the conceptual and aesthetic protocols by
which the U.S. represented itself to itself and to the world’s nations as
distinct, exemplary, and vulnerable. These events became subjects for early
U.S. literature, which framed their impact on American democracy, mak-
ing these events figure less as exceptions to the myth of American
4 R. RODRIGUEZ

e­xceptionalism and more as articulated episodes whose attendant risks

helped constitute the U.S.’s immunitary logic.1 The transformation of
sovereignty ushered in by the American Revolution finds full expression in
the language of exceptionalism, which offers a dominant rationale for ide-
ological inoculation against internal and external threats that sharpened
the outlines of an inchoate nation-state that, despite its limited diplomatic
and military resources, imagines itself, in Alexander Hamilton’s language,
“an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world” (7). At
once distinct and exemplary, the American empire, according to Hamilton,
is and is not like others that have come before it.2 Geographically isolated
and somewhat exempt from Europe’s tumultuous history, the U.S. is con-
ceived at its inception as immunized from the historical determinants that
bound proximate European empires in cycles of violence that charted the
rise and fall of states in the continent. The U.S., despite Hamilton’s excep-
tionalist claim, is not exempt from the history of imperial declension,
hence his urgent plea to fellow citizens that the new constitution—the
juridical blueprint for a strong centralized state touted capable of dealing
with rogue states both at home and abroad—be adopted and ratified, lest
the recently independent states disintegrate into singular or confederated
sovereignties that, via alliances with European powers, could permanently
extend continental conflicts into North America. The same consideration
about the states’ vulnerabilities from external threats applies to U.S.’s
plans to expand commercially and territorially, which is to say that the
exceptionalist fantasy of the yeoman farmer shielded from global contact
constitutes only one of the early republic’s many “imagined immunities,”
to borrow Priscilla Wald’s apt phrase from another context (29).
Before proceeding I should note with regard to the critical vocabulary
informing this study that it is important not to confuse the emergence of
concepts and categories with their subsequent self-representation. A term
takes on the qualities of a concept when its explanatory capacity tran-
scends the historical moment in which it was produced. Once the concept
enters critical discourse and gains currency, the field of inquiry is retroac-
tively realigned and the concept appears always to have been operative
even if the terminology was unavailable to historical agents. This is to say
that while the term “immunity” (or “exceptionalism,” for that matter)
seldom appears on the pages of the primary texts examined here, its ideo-
logical and operational force is well in evidence in U.S. culture during the
late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries.
 1 IMMUNITY’S SOVEREIGNTY 5

Immunity does not originate as a biomedical term that is then adopted

by political philosophers and policymakers. Its story is the other way
around, more discursive genealogy than unfolding history. Immunity as a
metaphor for the body’s natural defense mechanism is an example of cata-
chresis, the biomedical field’s discursive transposition of a concept from
the juridico-political to the biomedical field, a transposition resulting in a
dialectical relation between interanimating discourses constituting realpo-
litik.3 The relation between these two fields is a late nineteenth-century
phenomenon that becomes more pronounced in the aftermath of zoolo-
gist Élie Metchnikoff ‘s discovery, in 1881, “of immunity as a form of
biomedical self-defense” (Cohen 1). For my purposes, immunity will
remain immunized, as it were, from biomedicine’s increasingly reductive
paradigm, which, as Ed Cohen notes, “restricts the complex, contradic-
tory, and yet entirely necessary intimacy of organism and environment to
a single salient type of engagement: aggression/response” (5). Originally
conceived as a political category responsive to historical contingencies,
nonbiological immunity belongs to a sociopolitical and conceptual land-
scape of thought and action where exemption from communal obligation
initially defines the concept.4
An interdiction against community’s orientation toward the outside,
immunity initially appears as an invaginated recoil from contact with the
common, producing community’s purported integrity and exceptionality.
However, if exemption from such orientation or prior condition defines
immunity, then the relation between community and the common is not
one defined by the pure externality of opposites but one of embedded
immanence. An enclave in the common community relies on immunity to
institute and police its internal boundaries and external borders whose
function entails managing community’s relation to a dynamic ecosystem
whose magnitude is beyond its control. Not surprisingly immunity’s logic
is often found in texts calling for the need for more constricted or abbrevi-
ated definitions of community against some immeasurable vastness fraught
with risks that threaten community’s internal coherence—e.g. the wilder-
ness vis-à-vis the city upon hill, the state of nature of modern philosophy
vis-à-vis the commonwealth, or globalization vis-à-vis the nation-state.
What do these pairs index if not an opposition indicating the limiting of
some vast territoriality’s claim on a particular community’s idea of what
constitutes its identity and internal coherence? In each of these pairs we
find immunity presupposing an antinomy based not on simple opposition
but one where the contrasting terms are co-implicated in their mutual
6 R. RODRIGUEZ

presupposition and constitution. The tension inherent in such relation

makes absolute containment notoriously difficult. Borders, barriers, and
boundaries, along with ever more sophisticated shibboleths, are not just
checkpoints where access is granted or denied but rather constitute immu-
nizing attempts to contain a virtual or chthonic common in relation to
which immunity produces the conceptual, political and juridical categories
that determine the conditions for being, belonging, and dwelling (or not)
in the modern world.
Philosopher Roberto Esposito has arguably provided one of the most
rigorous, nuanced, and sustained accounts of immunity in recent history:

The negative of immunitas (which is another way of saying communitas)

doesn’t only disappear from its area of relevance, but constitutes simultane-
ously its object and motor. What is immunized, in brief, is the same com-
munity in a form that both preserves and negates it, or better, preserves it
through the negation of its original horizon of sense. From this point of
view, one might say that more than the defensive apparatus superimposed
on the community, immunization is its internal mechanism [ingranaggio]:
the fold that in some way separates community from itself, sheltering it from
an unbearable excess. The differential margin that prevents the community
from coinciding with itself takes on the deep semantic intensity of its own
concept. To survive, the community, every community, is forced to introject
the negative modality of its opposite, even if the opposite remains precisely
a lacking and contrastive mode of being of the community itself. (Bios, 52)

Building on Niklas Luhmann’s idea that systems work not by excluding or

avoiding conflict but by internalizing it, Esposito sets the concepts of
community and immunity in supplemental relation to one another, with
immunity operating as community’s self-protective response to its own
negative dimension. As such, immunity neutralizes conflicts or threats by
making them part of the autopoietic process by which community repro-
duces itself, which is to say, in immunological terms, that the only way out
is in. That is, if what threatens community is not a simple opposition but,
as Esposito argues, an “unbearable excess” that is community’s own nega-
tive dimension, then the sites characterized earlier as wilderness, state of
nature, or globalization, must be understood in each iteration as constitu-
tive of the immunizing strategies that produce community’s idea of itself
and its representations. Put another way, wilderness, state of nature, or
globalization are not exceptions to their particular counterparts, nor the
desert upon which the fortress is superimposed, to borrow Esposito’s
 1 IMMUNITY’S SOVEREIGNTY 7

metaphor, but an already differentiated outside inhabiting community’s

innermost interior.
Mapped onto the transnational relations that constitute global order,
Esposito’s work offers a useful way for thinking about immunity’s role in
the formation of exceptionalist discourses of identity, but while he
acknowledges that globalization’s transnational flows of capital, commod-
ities, people, and ideas constitute the “definitive background of [the
immunitary] paradigm,” this very background recedes from his philo-
sophical project. My aim is to bring this background into the foreground
by way of a contextual examination of flashpoint events in American his-
tory that are often treated separately and in marginal relation to main-
stream accounts of the formation of American culture. This is due in part
to the legacy of an exceptionalist tradition in American culture that made,
and still makes, a virtue out of isolationist fantasies that, as I argue here,
are best understood when read as manifestations of an immunitary logic.
Immunity, as I show hereafter, is the ghost in the machine of American
exceptionalism, an institutionalized discourse that has seen better days in
American Studies.5 A zombie ideology unaware of its own walking-dead
status, exceptionalism operates these days as an embattled ethos, or per-
haps it might be better conceived as always having been an aggressive
ethos of embattlement. In North America, exceptionalism found early
expression in the Puritan jeremiad, a genre announcing that the errand
into the American wilderness would not be an easy go for English reli-
gious exiles looking to erect a city upon hill for the world to emulate. This
attitude of beleaguerment served Puritan settlers well as they tried to
maintain the integrity of group identity in the face of territorial expan-
sion’s risks of enemy attacks, communal fracture and demographic disper-
sal. That is, the Puritan’s ideal city was imagined as one assailed by savages
and foreigners as well as threatened by internal dissension. Consider
Sacvan Bercovitch’s classic account of the legitimating function of the
Puritan jeremiad’s articulation of a sense of crisis as the settling of the
wilderness tested the integrity of the bond uniting the covenantal settlers:

Substituting teleology for hierarchy, it [the Puritan jeremiad] discarded the

Old World ideal of stasis for a New World vision of the future. Its function
was to create a climate of anxiety that helped release the restless “progressiv-
ist” energies required for the success of the venture…. Like all traditionalist
forms of ritual, it uses fear and trembling to teach acceptance of fixed social
norms. But the American Puritan jeremiad went much further. It made
8 R. RODRIGUEZ

a­ nxiety its end as well as its means. Crisis was the social norm it sought to
inculcate. The future, though divinely assured, was never quite there, and
New England’s Jeremiahs set out to provide the sense of insecurity that
would ensure the outcome. (23)

The Puritan transformation of static hierarchy into unfolding telos intro-

duces the concept of crisis into a worldview where the future, “though
divinely secured,” is threatened by communal declension from a virtuous
past retroactively posited as such. Far from manifest, America’s destiny, in
the Puritan imagination, is an imperiled project jeopardized by spiritual
and social degeneration demanding redemptive renewal of the covenant
with God in the present. The ideological dimension of the Puritans’ domi-
nant discursive mode finds plaintive articulation in subsequent generations
of nation- and empire-builders’ reformulations of the vulnerability of set-
tlers dwelling in appropriated territory.
The “rising empire” that George Washington foresaw at the end of the
American Revolutionary War and that James Monroe sought to protect
from competing imperial influence in the Americas favored an isolationist
and exceptionalist ethos belied by expansionist practices that alibied the
state’s unfettered sense of its own manifest destiny.6 Washington’s “rising
empire,” also pitched into an uncertain future, would be contingent on
the government’s capacity to make of the many former colonies one
nation. National unity, a presupposition more so than a reality at the time,
could be achieved and maintained only if factional conflict could be neu-
tralized. Factional cracks in the national edifice, Washington argued,
would expose the country to foreign influence, contracting the nation’s
“detached and distant” geographical immunity and compromising its sov-
ereignty to foreign influences.7 If executive aversions to “permanent”
(Washington’s “Farewell Address”) and “entangling” (Jefferson’s “First
Inaugural Address”) alliances with European powers formed the basis for
an isolationist foreign policy characterized by unilateralism, the nation, in
its early decades, witnessed commercial and territorial expansion on a scale
that by the 1830s seemed to confirm Alexis de Tocqueville’s judgment
that American society was indeed “exceptional” (517). The term “excep-
tional” in Tocqueville is closer in meaning to the word “exempt,” consid-
ering that, as Peter Onuf observes, “the institutional and ideological
legacies of colonialism were ubiquitous” in America (88).
Tocqueville considered America “exceptional” because he found it
exempt from the imperial ambitions plaguing Europe with internecine
 1 IMMUNITY’S SOVEREIGNTY 9

wars between neighboring states and void of the feudal traditions resulting
in class strife. American society thus imagined itself immunized by the
protection afforded by two oceans and providentially destined to assert
dominion over the continent, if not the hemisphere, as evident, for exam-
ple, in the arc of Walt Whitman’s poetic trajectory across the continent,
“starting from Paumanok” (Long Island) and ending in Mexico, where
the poet’s persona ventriloquizes chants of praise to the agents of
Manifest Destiny:

Americanos! conquerors! marches humanitarian!

Foremost! century marches! Libertad! masses!
For you a programme of chants….
Shooting in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all. (275)

Whitman’s exceptionalist version of the American empire for liberty leaves

not displacement and death in its march but rather promises, in the poet’s
Latinate English, to “vivify all.” In Whitman, territorial expansion results
in linguistic transculturation, where conquest-as-liberty is celebrated by
conquered and conquerors alike in an Anglo-American version of
Spanglish, which, while eliding imperial violence and registering it as cul-
tural gain, also indexes the porosity and therefore vulnerability of national
identity. In other words, if exceptionalism provides the stimulus for
American subjects to go forth and conquer, thereby instantiating the
introjection of alien and foreign elements, the result of this fantasy is not
only the qualified assimilation of the conquered other but the transforma-
tion of the imperial subject as well, not to mention the meaning of the
term “American.”
Poe and Whitman offer then not two antithetical representations of
exceptionalist America (hermetic or expansive, respectively) but more like
twin strategies of the same immunitary logic. What both writers reveal is
that immunizing measures, such as the ideological creation of container
functions (the Prince’s palace as metaphor for the nation-state) or engag-
ing in “defensive” wars, as in the case with Mexico, can end up compro-
mising the unique and enviable qualities the nation is said to possess. If
exceptionalism provided American writers with the conceptual and aes-
thetic means for representing America to itself as distinct or exemplary, the
immunizing strategies the nation often deployed to assert its sovereignty
also imperiled the integrity of its purported boundedness.
10 R. RODRIGUEZ

In the wake of the Cold War, American exceptionalism has lost traction,
more recently with scholars interested in the transnationalization of
American culture. Case in point is Donald Pease’s post-mortem on “the
breakdown of the encompassing state of fantasy called American excep-
tionalism that had regulated U.S. citizens’ relationship to the political
order for the preceding half century” (1). According to Pease,

Myths normally do the work of incorporating events into recognizable

national narratives. But traumatic events precipitate states of emergency that
become the inaugural moments in a different symbolic order and take place
on a scale that exceeds the grasp of the available representations from the
national mythology…. At moments of decisive historical transition, like the
one that emerged at the conclusion to the cold war, the official national
mythology could no longer incorporate these traumatic events into the nar-
rative logic of an unfolding teleology. That teleology had come to an end
and the mythology for a newly configured order had not yet been
invented. (5)

This moment of “decisive historical transition” defines an interregnum

period that William Spanos dates from the Vietnam War to our own time,
during which a delegitimated American exceptionalism continues to
underwrite the American state’s self-appointed role of redeemer nation on
a global scale:

It is true that, on the one hand the American exceptionalist myth self-de-­
structed theoretically during the course of the Vietnam War … and then
again, even more decisively, with George W. Bush’s declaration of the
United States’ unending global War on Terror and the rogue states, like Iraq
and Afghanistan, that harbored terrorists in the aftermath of September 11,
2001, and, on the other, that the multiplication of contrapuntal postcolonial
voices have challenged the American version of the exceptionalist Western
narrative of modern global history…. Despite its theoretical disintegration,
the American exceptionalist ethos continues, after the fall of the Bush
administration, to remain intact as hegemonic “truth.” (81)

Both Pease and Spanos attest to the endurance of the myth of exceptional-
ism as they trace its various incarnations and contradictions to the present
day. In their own ways their work gives credence to Octave Mannoni’s
theory of the fetishist’s formula, which allows the fetishist to persist in his
belief in the face of evidence to the contrary: I know well … (e.g. that
 1 IMMUNITY’S SOVEREIGNTY 11

American exceptionalism is a bankrupt idea), but all the same I believe …

(e.g. that it continues to underwrite representations of national identity
and offer citizens a sense of belonging and purpose) (70). We find a ver-
sion of this avowal-disavowal tension in President Obama’s affirmation of
his faith in American exceptionalism coupled with his observation that
citizens of other nations also believe their countries to be exceptional
(Scherer). The president’s point is that there’s nothing exceptional about
exceptionalism, and yet …. In Mannoni’s formulation of Freud’s notion
of Verleugnung (disavowal of reality), belief upends knowledge, binding
subjects to objects, practices, beliefs and ideas perhaps never more so than
when they are questioned or discredited. By way of a disavowal of real-
ity—for instance, that exceptionalism is not solely an American phenom-
enon—the national fetishists can insist that their nation is possessed of the
exceptional Thing that other nations lack, and therefore they can persist in
their belief and in much else that belief entails. It is therefore not surpris-
ing to find in Pease’s and Spano’s analyses a preoccupation with how this
enduring myth conditions subjects’ capacity to believe. In Pease’s psycho-
analytically informed examination, American exceptionalism is a fantasy
whose chief aim is to elicit citizens’ legitimation of state authority, while
for Spanos it figures as an ethos conditioned now by the War on Terror’s
spectacles of shock and awe, which, among other things, are designed to
cow a citizenry into silence.8 Fantasy and spectacle, though conceptually
different objects, function as exhibits designed to mobilize subjects’ imag-
inative and affective capacities to comprehend their relation to the world,
not just as spectators but as participants whose immersive position within
spectacle or fantasy, while promising a sense of belonging and mitigated
precarity, disallows the necessary distance or alienating dimension that
might enable citizens to question the forced choice—security over free-
dom packaged as freedom in security—elicited by the state.
While indebted to Spanos’ and Pease’s critiques of how fantasy and
spectacle offer citizens staged simulacrums of political participation, my
concern here is less with the exhibits’ relation to their intended audience
and more with the concept and logic that enables the fantasy or spectacle
in the first place, i.e. with the immunological kernel at the heart of every
mutation and incarnation of this enduring ideology. In claiming sover-
eignty for immunity in this study, which is to say relative independence
from the language of exceptionalism, I aim to isolate (the irony is not lost
on me) a concept from a delegitimated myth, in order to show how this
concept persists in its legitimation of state authority as it sheds discursive
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models or genres (i.e. jeremiad, myth) and takes on new ones (fantasy,
spectacle, etc.). In the context of our seemingly never-ending war on ter-
ror, where an ailing foundational myth shows signs of its unexceptionality,
the language and practices of immunity, however, are healthy and flourish-
ing. Crackdowns on illegal immigration, travel bans, the rise in detention
centers and the number of deportations, an increase in protective tariffs
against foreign commerce, and escalation in military armament against
rogue states, all index signs of inoculation from global exchanges and
interactions deemed now excessive and pernicious but once thought nec-
essary for the continued health of the nation-state.
That is to say, immunity, while seeking exemption, thrives on contact,
risk, and potentially contagious relationality. A glance at today’s headlines
might lead one to read Poe’s Red Death as a metaphor for globalization
and the transnational flows of capital, mass migrations, war and terror that
threaten the integrity of local, national, and regional polities. To be sure,
this is not to argue that globalization poses an absolute threat to the nation-
state (there’s no shortage of exceptionalist war-hawks and doves across the
political landscape advocating for neoliberal free trade), but it goes without
saying that globalization’s critics never tire of pointing out its capacities for
weakening the aforementioned polities against its influence. The resur-
gence of nationalism, racism, and ethnocentrism that we have witnessed in
recent years have been read by many as symptoms of what Peter Sloterdijk
calls “the advanced erosion of ethnic container functions.” Framing the
current crisis in immunological terms, Sloterdijk reads the loss of meaning
for the nation-state as part of an immunological transformation, “a trend
towards a world of thin-walled and mixed ‘societies’” that for numerous
people is “neither clear nor welcome.” The erosion of imaginary and real
immunitary structures takes on spatial metaphors of walls considered easier
to breach by populations less bound by the convergence of self and place:

What was previously understood as ‘society’ and invoked with it was usually,
in fact, nothing other the content of a thick-walled, territorially grounded,
symbol-assisted and generally monolingual container—that is, a collective
which found its self-assurance in a certain national hermeticism and flour-
ished in redundancies of its own (that could never be entirely understood by
strangers). Because of their self-containing qualities, such historical com-
munities—known as people—stayed on the point of intersection between
self and place and usually relied on a considerable asymmetry between inside
and outside; this usually manifested itself in pre-political cultures as naive
 1 IMMUNITY’S SOVEREIGNTY 13

ethnocentrism, and at the political level in the substantive difference between

inner (domestic) and outer (foreign) policy. The effects of globalization
increasingly evened out this difference and asymmetry; the immunity offered
by the national container is perceived as increasingly endangered by those
who profit from it. (152)

Sloterdijk’s consideration of globalization is a welcome supplement to

Esposito’s biopolitical model in that it allows for a broadening of historical
scope. But the spatial poetics of Sloterdijk’s immunological transforma-
tion is problematic because of its adherence to the conception of the
nation-state as a “container function” that he shares with Poe’s Prince,
who imagined he and his guests safe behind the thick walls of the palace.
My concern here, pace Sloterdjik, is not with the erosion of the “container
function” but with the transnational events that produced that particular
metaphor as a way of conferring identity and a sense of secured belonging
onto citizens exposed, oddly enough, to the consequences of international
practices (e.g. global commerce, transatlantic slavery, immigration, expan-
sionism, etc.) sanctioned by the state. This book examines the relation
between immunity and democratic sovereignty as a way to better under-
stand how isolationist and exceptionalist attitudes helped shape the U.S.’s
self-image as distinct, unique and vulnerable while the nation found itself
entangled in transnational practices and conflicts at the moment it was
claiming exception from external forces. In doing so, the questions I raise
here—for instance, about Jefferson’s anxieties concerning the impact of
global commerce on the integrity of the republic, particularly its racial
integrity; about U.S. subjects’ affinities with Haitian rebels and the pros-
pect of slave rebellion in the U.S.; about debates concerning how to deal
with North African rovers and homegrown dissidents; and about the
repercussions of sectional conflict over Cuba—articulate with recent
attempts to unsettle long held notions about the insular formation of
American culture as well as the disciplinary methods of its study.9

Chapter 2: The Haitian Exception

In 1791, Thomas Jefferson’s nightmare of a race war broke out in the
French colony of Saint Domingue, not far from the North American main-
land, creating a massive refugee crisis for the U.S. This chapter examines
fictional and nonfictional narratives about Haiti in order to track immuni-
ty’s mutating logic as Americans responded with a mixture of sympathy
14 R. RODRIGUEZ

and horror at the events transpiring in the former French colony. These
texts, chief among them Leonora Sansay’s novel Secret History; or, the
Horrors of St. Domingo, often availed themselves of sentimental and sensa-
tional tropes to frame shifting reactions to a revolutionary world-­event
that more often than not resisted strategies of silencing and disavowal.

Chapter 3: Algerian Captivity

and State Autoimmunity

As colonial racial order in St. Domingue was being demolished by former

slaves, U.S. attempts to maintain a commercial presence in the Atlantic
similarly resulted in the inversion of domestic slavery’s racial hierarchy, as
U.S. subjects found themselves and their cargo captives of the North
African regencies. Colonial America’s commerce in the region had been
protected by British naval power and diplomatic influence, but bereft of
both soon after independence, the U.S. found its commerce and citizens
subject to North African demands for tribute.
Haiti and Algiers figure in early U.S. literature as reflexive models of the
U.S.’s political project: Haiti as the anarchic obverse of popular democracy
and Algiers as the return of absolute sovereignty. Each of these ideological
models obliquely illustrates the potential degeneration and failure of U.S.
democracy. As the newly emergent U.S. staked its claim on the world econ-
omy, this mode of narrativizing the crisis in sovereignty that brought the new
state into being found form and content in the political and economic con-
flicts that would immediately test the meaning of independent sovereignty. In
order to modulate the pessimism that informs the reflexive moment in these
narratives, the chronotope of the return home, from the revolutionary chaos
in Haiti or abject captivity in Algiers, becomes the fictions’ focal point, pro-
viding the estranged U.S. subject with a meaningful if uncertain destination.
That is, as much as the figures in these novels desire the privileges and immu-
nities citizenship affords, upon their reentry the space of the nation bears
uncanny similarities to the spaces of captivity they thought they left behind.

Chapter 4: Poe and Democracy’s

Biopolitical Immunity
This chapter examines immunity in relation to the re-emergence of
Romance in the nineteenth century. A fiery discourse invested in the radi-
cal transformation of the ordinary world, the Romance genre has to con-
 1 IMMUNITY’S SOVEREIGNTY 15

tend with an increasingly reified world where the possibilities for public
action and social change are re-contained within a globalizing capitalist
economy, centralized state power, and a vast network of institutions whose
chief function is to organize what is left of public life. With the advent of
democracy and the expansion of the world market, sovereign power
undergoes a radical reconstitution in which the politicization of life across
every strata of society becomes necessary for the reproduction of social,
political, and economic orders. The transformation in power ushered in by
the age of revolution and democracy would not be possible if people did
not actively participate with varying degrees of agency and social mobility
in the constitution of the sociopolitical order. It is as if with the invention
of modern democracy came a supplemental biopolitical order very much
invested in managing life. “Immunity’s Sovereignty” turns to the work of
Edgar Allan Poe in order to engage the biopolitical dimension of the
domestic conflicts that previous generations of U.S. writers had displaced
to foreign sites. Poe’s work records in horror what he perceives as the pass-
ing of old-style Republicanism and the emergence of popular democracy
in Jacksonian America. The fear that the federal state would be a govern-
ment of people, not states, loomed in the imagination of an elite witness-
ing the erosion of the buffer zones it had erected in order to distance itself
from the encroaching masses. We might dismiss Poe’s attacks on democ-
racy as the criticism of an aspiring elite bemoaning the breakdown of social
hierarchy and traditional values, but in doing so we miss engaging a seri-
ous opposition to the immunization of life in democratic order.

Chapter 5: Cuba and the Imperial Solution

Poe’s work appears at a moment in the history of the U.S. when sectional
conflict was riddled with failing compromises that only sharpened the split
between North and South. The proposed immunizing fix to this conflict
took as one of its forms expansion into the Caribbean. Plans to annex
Cuba, central America, and the Amazon basin were proposed as possible
solutions to either drain the South of its slave population or to establish
the new headquarters of the Southern Confederacy. These proposals
aimed to dissipate domestic conflict over new continental acquisition
(Texas, Mexico, Oregon), which always stirred the seemingly irresolvable
issue of slavery. But the Caribbean proved no easy getaway for romantic
filibusters looking to make a name for themselves or for compromisers
hoping to delay or avoid a sectional war. Instead, the Caribbean figured as
16 R. RODRIGUEZ

a site where domestic antagonisms were, much like in Algiers and Haiti,
again refracted through an exotic prism.
An expanding empire from its beginning, the U.S. found itself with the
difficult task of having to accommodate sectional interests in the acquisi-
tion of new territory. The South hoped to annex new lands to the Union
to maintain state parity with the North, while the North aimed to control
commerce with outlying regions without necessarily having to add new
states to the Union and thereby try to avoid exacerbating the issue of slav-
ery. The book’s last chapter reads U.S. novels about Cuba, Lucy Pickens’
The Free Flag of Cuba (1854) and Mary Peabody Mann’s Juanita: A
Romance of Real Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago (1887) in order to track the
mounting crisis in the U.S. over national sovereignty. More specifically, it
examines how these novels reflect on the transition from federal to national
sovereignty and the emergence of an imperial state produced by the nor-
malization of wartime exceptions.

Chapter 6: Panic Room

The book concludes with a brief examination of the Trump administration’s
attempts to immunize the U.S. from unauthorized immigration by building
a wall along its southwest border with Mexico. Far from exceptional, the
walling frenzy that’s gripped the Global North is but one symptom of mod-
ern nation-states’ inability to regulate the disruptive neoliberal forces
responsible for mobilizing global migration. The increasing criminalization
of the border, coupled with the Trump administration’s model of governing
on this issue through executive order and suspended rule of law, makes the
wall not just the symbol of waning sovereignty but a contested site where
democratic praxis must immunize itself from its own lethal dimension.
The constellation of articulated episodes that this book examines are by
no means exhaustive of modernity’s immunitary logic as evident in the
tumultuous early decades of the U.S. but rather constitute a genealogy of
the resilience of a concept with extraordinary explanatory power as it is
discursively deployed to constitute and legitimate sovereign order. Often
treated as isolated incidents by nation-based analyses or area studies’
regional foci, these flashpoint episodes demand a new theoretical recon-
ceptualization, one that examines local, national, regional and transna-
tional events as expressions of immunitary logic. As this study demonstrates,
this logic’s antinomies find representation in literary texts’ dramatizations
of the propositions by which democracy’s exposure to its own fragility
serves as rationale for immunity’s sovereignty.
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
Only when a satellite is in the right position can you see the
reflection of sunlight from a plane surface on its body. Diagram 2
shows how flashes of reflected light are observed. The light of the
sun, S, is reflected from a plane surface, R, on the satellite to our
observing station, T, on the earth. If we imagine the line ORB drawn
perpendicular to R, we know, from the law of reflection, that the
angle of incidence, i, made by the sunlight to this line will be equal
to the angle of reflection, i′, between the reflected light and 55
the same line. The law of reflection also tells us that the sun,
the line ORB, and the observing station all must now lie in the same
plane. And, since we can calculate where the satellite is in its orbit at
this exact moment, we can locate line ORB. But what about the spin
axis? We know where on the satellite our reflector R is located, so
we know ahead of time what the angle θ′ between ORB and the spin
axis, OP, will be. We call it the flash angle. Thus we can tell that the
spin axis will be somewhere on the surface of an imaginary cone
[3]
OPP″ that has ORB as its axis and 2θ′ as its vertex angle .
1.
Solar aspect cells on the satellite report via telemetry the
amount of sunlight they receive; from these data we can
calculate the angle θ between the satellite’s spin axis, OP,
and the satellite-sun line, OS. This means that OP can be
anywhere on the surface of cone OPP′.
2.
When sunlight is reflected to observing station T on the
earth, we know that the angle of incidence i must be equal
to the angle of reflection i′, and, if ORB is a line
perpendicular to the reflector R, we know that the sun, the
observer, and line ORB must all lie in one plane. Since we
also know the position of the satellite in its orbit and the
distance from it to the earth, we can locate line ORB
precisely. The reflector R is set at an angle θ′ of 68° from
the spin axis OP. This tells us that the spin axis must lie on
the cone OPP″, which is now precisely determined by its
axis ORB and its vertex angle 2θ′, equal to 136°.
 56

3.
Cones OPP′ and OPP″ intersect along the two lines OP and
OQ, so these are the only possible spin axis locations. From
our general knowledge of the situation (or from any third
measurement of glint time), OQ can be ruled out, and we
conclude that only OP can be the true spin axis.

In Diagram 3 we have combined our two measurements of the

satellite’s spin axis. You can see that the two cones will intersect
along two straight lines, OP and OQ; these are thus the only possible
positions that will satisfy both our measurements. Actually, of
course, only one of these lines is the true location of the spin axis.
And it is usually obvious which one it is, when we consider all our
other data about the satellite’s position.

Using this technique, if we measure the exact times when we see

flashes of reflected sunlight from Telstar, we can combine that
information with data from our six solar aspect cells and get a good
plot of the position of the satellite’s spin axis.

In theory, this looked like a very promising idea. But finding a

satisfactory way to put it into practice was something else again. Our
first thought was simply to make use of the light reflected from the
sapphire covers on the satellite’s solar cells. However, these covers
have a low coefficient of reflection and do not form a completely flat
surface. This means that the light reflected from them is very much
reduced in intensity and spreads out too much to give us the precise
readings we want. On the other hand, if we attached a plane mirror
with a high reflection coefficient to the satellite, we thought we
could pick up the minute flashes of reflected light from a 57
distance of as much as a few thousand miles. So we decided
to press ahead with this scheme and install one or more reflectors
on the satellite.

By the time we started work on the mirrors, the final design of

Telstar I was almost complete; this meant that we had to squeeze
our mirrors aboard it as best we could. The most stringent physical
requirement in designing them was weight; they could not add more
than half a pound to Telstar’s total load. Nor could they project more
than one-eighth inch from the satellite’s surface, or they might
interfere with the radiation pattern for the main antenna. We also
decided to make the mirrors out of highly polished metal, since any
other possible material might break too easily. And the mirrors had
to be as flat as possible, so the beam of reflected sunlight would not
diverge by more than one degree.
Thus we had to design mirrors that would be very thin, very shiny,
very flat, very light, and almost unbreakable. After much
experimenting, we solved this rather tricky problem. The mirrors we
added onto Telstar I, as you can see in the illustration below, were
machined from aluminum alloy sheet, carefully polished by hand
with abrasive papers, and buffed on a cloth wheel. Finally, we
evaporated a thin layer of pure aluminum onto their surfaces to
improve their reflection coefficients and make them resistant to
corrosion. The three mirrors were fastened to the surface of the
satellite with small screws, which had to be tightened and shimmed
very carefully so that the mirrors stayed as flat as possible.

Locating the Mirrors on the Satellite

As we mentioned above, the flash angle θ′ between the satellite’s

spin axis and a line perpendicular to the mirror is very important in
our calculations. We made detailed studies of the various flash
angles that would be possible during the first 60 days after launch.
We plotted the times when the satellite would be above the horizon
while our Crawford’s Hill, New Jersey, observing station was in
darkness, and we made allowance for satellite orbits that might
deviate slightly from the planned one. These calculations told us that
the best flash angle for the mirror would be 68 degrees—which is
the angle made by the first facets above Telstar’s equatorial antenna
band. So we located a flat mirror on one of these facets. Because
one of the solar aspect cells was already installed in the center of
this facet, we were forced to cut a circular hole out of the center of
the mirror.

But we knew that one mirror could not do the whole job. After
Telstar I had been in orbit more than 30 days, the 68-degree mirror
would only be in position to give infrequent flashes, and one at
about 95 degrees would be more useful. This presented two
problems. First, no facet on the satellite makes a 95-degree angle
with the spin axis. However, we could use one of the facets just
below the equatorial antenna, which makes a 112-degree angle, and
groove or facet the mirror so that its reflecting faces became narrow
strips slanted 17 degrees away from the base at the angle of 95
degrees (112 - 17 = 95). Our second problem was space—since
there was not enough room left on any of the 112-degree facets to
mount a second large mirror, we substituted two smaller mirrors and
mounted them 120 degrees apart. This arrangement lets us know
from which mirror we see flashes—the plane mirror gives one flash
for each revolution of the satellite; the faceted mirrors give two
flashes for each revolution of the satellite.

58
Sketches of three reflecting mirrors and their locations on
the Telstar satellite. The upper plane mirror is set at 68° to
the spin axis; the lower ones are faceted to give reflecting
surfaces at 95°. Two of the satellite’s six solar aspect cells
can be seen within the circular cut-outs in the mirrors.

59
How We Record Flashes from the Mirrors

Now we had finally found a satisfactory way to reflect a train of tiny

flashes—much too faint to be seen by the naked eye—from Telstar
as it passed across the sky during the night. But our main aim was
to record the exact times when these flash bursts occurred. With this
information, we could, using the method we described above, tell
very accurately both the satellite’s spin axis and its rate of spin. We
do not have space to describe the many problems that had to be
solved in setting up the equipment to record the flashes. Let us
merely outline the procedure that we finally devised:

1. To pick up the satellite’s flashes we use a 12-inch-aperture

photoelectric telescope mounted on a radar trailer (shown in
illustration below). It is pointed by means of prediction drive tapes
produced by an electronic computer; these are based on data from
previous passes.

2. On clear, dark nights when the satellite is at relatively short range,

we can see it with an auxiliary finder telescope, and then adjust the
large telescope precisely. Or, if the satellite’s high-frequency beacon
has been turned on, the Holmdel microwave antenna can
automatically point our large telescope.

3. When flashes of light are picked up by the telescope, they fall

directly onto the cathode of a photomultiplier tube. They are then
filtered out from the random light in the night sky and amplified.
Twelve-inch telescope and electronics box mounted on a
radar antenna pedestal at Crawford’s Hill. Three-inch
sighting telescope mounted on top has since been replaced
by six-inch telescope.

4. Rather than make a continuous recording of the output—one

night this would have produced a record twelve miles long for us to
pore over—we use an electronic trigger. This is the time base of an
oscilloscope, whose sawtooth output is set in operation only if a
signal of four volts or more is received (photo below).

5. A pen recorder makes a continuous line on a revolving 60

drum, with a heated stylus connected to a galvanometer
marking a permanent record on heat-sensitive paper. Any signal
output from the oscilloscope is picked up by the galvanometer and
causes the pen to make a sawtoothed mark; when the paper is
unrolled from the drum, these marks are clearly visible as notches in
a series of otherwise straight lines.

6. A synchronous timer marks the chart every ten seconds, and we

are able to time individual pulses with a precision of one tenth of a
second. Because the beginning and end of a train of pulses are not
always distinct, we can only determine the center of a burst of
flashes—which we use as our most important time indication—to
within two seconds. However, this is accurate enough, for a change
of only one degree in the orientation of the satellite’s spin axis would
change the time of the flash burst center by about half a minute
(see below).

7. We use a second oscilloscope to check on whether the signals we

receive are genuine flashes or just accidental stray light. This
oscilloscope has a long-persistence screen, which we use as a
temporary memory. The pulses traced on its cathode ray tube are
automatically photographed by a 35-mm camera while they persist
on the screen. We can then examine the photograph to see if the
pulses are genuine, which we ascertain from (a) their shape and size
and (b) the intervals between successive pulses. Looking at the
photographic record also confirms whether we are observing flashes
from the 68° plane mirror or the 95° faceted mirrors. We can
calculate the satellite’s spin rate by measuring the intervals between
individual flashes.
General view of amplifying, monitoring, and recording gear
that picks up glints of sunlight at the Crawford’s Hill
observation station.

61

Enlarged portion of a typical pen record of flashes of

sunlight from Telstar mirrors, showing a burst of 21 glints
from the 68° mirror recorded at 03:40:58 Greenwich Mean
Time on August 9, 1962. Synchronizing vibration mark
seven lines above the recorded burst indicates the time
02:59:00. Measuring the horizontal distance between
consecutive sawtooth marks tells us that the spin rate is
between 163 and 164 revolutions per minute. (Precise
measurements of the oscilloscope traces fixed the exact
spin rate at the time of this burst at 163.64 revolutions per
minute.)

Results

Telstar I was launched on July 10, 1962. That evening, beginning on

the satellite’s seventh pass, we were able to detect trains of flashes
from the mirrors. We assumed that, since Telstar had been launched
almost exactly according to plan, its spin axis would be
perpendicular to the plane of the earth’s orbit, and we calculated
when we should see the flashes. And, each time, we actually saw
them within two minutes of the times we had predicted—so we
knew that the spin axis was almost exactly where it should be.

Our measurements have continued whenever the weather and other

conditions permitted. Combining readings from the bursts of flashes
and telemetry data from the solar aspect cells, we have accurately
plotted Telstar’s spin axis; it has continued to precess very much as
we predicted it would. We have also seen what happens to the spin
axis when the satellite’s torque coil is turned on. And, by measuring
the intervals between flashes, we have made very precise
measurements of the spin rate, which is gradually decreasing mostly
according to schedule. However, the plot is showing some small
unexplained variations of spin decay rate, and a study of them will,
we hope, throw light on some of the variations of the earth’s
magnetic field.

For future communications work, particularly with satellites at longer

ranges, it would seem to be preferable to use stiffer, flatter mirrors
and to make them from beryllium rather than aluminum alloy. More
accurate tracking means, more observatory sites, and more powerful
telescopes will also be needed. But for this first experimental use our
little mirrors have worked very well.

Jeofry S. Courtney-Pratt was born in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia,

and received a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University
of Tasmania in 1942 and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in
1949. He was also awarded an Sc.D. by Cambridge in 1958. He
joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1958, and has done research
in high-speed photography, optics, optical masers, the properties
of materials, and the physics of the contact of solids.
62
 CASE HISTORY NO. 4
How Do We Keep Solar Cell Power Plants
Working in Space?

Kenneth D. Smith
Electronics Engineer—Member of Staff, Semiconductor Device
Laboratory

THE PROBLEM

Before we learned about the Van Allen belts, we expected that the
solar cells used to power satellites would last for many years in
space. We thought they would be damaged only by cosmic rays,
micrometeorites, and occasional bursts of particles from the sun. But
when the solar plants of some American satellites went out of action
after only a few weeks in orbit, we realized that in the future solar
cell power units would need better protection from radiation
damage. We had learned that satellites—and particularly medium
altitude communications satellites—must spend a lot of time in
regions where they will be struck by thousands or even millions of
high-speed radiation particles each second.

This fact forced us to change almost all our thinking about solar
power plants for satellites. To make sure they would last for several
years, we had to design new types of solar cells and devise new
ways of mounting them. We also had to revise our estimates of how
much power we could expect to get from our cells.

If a communications satellite is to go into regular commercial

service, it must continue working for several years in space. The
Telstar satellite, however, was designed as an experimental project,
and we decided that two years would be a reasonable lifetime to
plan for. When Project Telstar began, our problem was to develop
solar cells that would operate in an environment subject to strong
radiation effects—and keep on operating there for two years.

63
Organizing the Work

Our work on the solar cells for Telstar I began in October, 1960. With
just a little more than a year to go before the satellite had to be
ready, there was no time to lose. So we decided to break down the
over-all problem into three parts:

Finding out how radiation would affect various kinds of solar

cells;
Making experimental cells and, when the best had been picked,
determining the best ways to make them in the large quantities
we would need; and
Developing ways to mount the cells on the Telstar satellite so
that they would withstand the stresses of being launched, the
effects of radiation particles, and extreme changes in
temperature.

A different group of people began work simultaneously on each of

these three parts of the problem, with each of them going ahead
under the assumption that the others would be successful. Each
group had to find the answers to many very interesting questions,
but since our space is limited we can only discuss some of them
here. Before doing so, however, we must say something about what
a solar cell is and how it works.

Technical Background on Solar Cells

There are two ways of making a silicon solar cell. In one, the body
of the cell is what we call n-type silicon—that is, pure silicon that has
been doped with a small number of impurity atoms of an element
such as phosphorus or arsenic (from group V of the periodic table).
[4]
This kind of semiconductor conducts electricity by means of a
supply of free-to-move electrons (negative charges) caused by the
presence of these impurity atoms. To make a workable solar cell
from n-type silicon, a thin surface layer of p-type silicon is formed by
diffusing atoms of a material from group III of the periodic table—
usually boron—into the silicon. Metallic contacts then are made to
these two regions. This kind of cell is known as a p-on-n cell.

The second type of solar cell is just the reverse. It begins with a
body of p-type silicon (with impurity atoms from a group III
element) and conducts electricity by means of “holes”—vacant sites
where electrons might be but are not. These holes act as free-to-
move positive charges. We can make a solar cell from this material
by diffusing a layer of n-type impurity, such as phosphorus, into it.
We call this an n-on-p cell (see the figure below).

Construction of a silicon solar cell of the n-on-p type

(thickness of n-layer greatly exaggerated).

titanium-silver evaporated contact with solder dip finish

antireflection coating
contact gridding for lower series resistance
15 mil wafer, p-type
0.4 micron front layer, n-type
The key to the operation of either type of solar cell is the junction
between the regions of n-type and p-type material—what we 64
call the p-n junction. In an actual n-on-p cell this junction is
only about twenty millionths of an inch below the surface, since that
is the thickness of the n-layer. At this point, where the hole-rich p-
region meets the electron-rich n-region, there is a permanent, built-
in electric field. As shown in the figure below, the n-layer has many
free electrons (indicated by minus signs) and a few holes (circled
pluses), while the p-region has many holes and a few electrons.
When the cell is in equilibrium, thermal agitation causes some holes
to diffuse into the p-region. We call these stray holes and electrons
minority carriers (the circled pluses and minuses in the figure). Thus,
the n-layer has a slight positive charge and the p-body has a slight
negative charge; this results in a difference in potential across the
junction, which in silicon amounts to about seven-tenths of a volt.

Schematic diagram of an n-on-p solar cell. In the n-layer,

minuses represent free electrons, circled pluses are
minority-carrier holes; in the p-type body, pluses represent
holes, circled minuses are minority-carrier electrons.

Sunlight is made up of individual corpuscles of energy called

photons. When these photons are absorbed in or near a cell’s p-n
junction, they liberate both a free-to-move negative charge and a
free-to-move positive charge—this is called generating a hole-
electron pair. The electric field across the p-n junction causes the
holes to flow to the p-side and the electrons to the n-side of the
barrier. This flow tends to make the p-side positive and the n-side
negative, so that, when a load is connected between them, a useful
external voltage (amounting to about six-tenths of a volt) is
produced, and electric current will flow. Thus, we have converted
light energy into electrical energy.

Only part of the energy in light can be used to generate an electrical

output, since a good deal of the light striking a cell is absorbed as
heat or is reflected from its surface. The percentage of solar energy
that can be converted into usable electric power is called the cell’s
conversion factor or efficiency. Although this can theoretically be as
high as 22%, the best cells we have made in the laboratory have
conversion factors of only about 15%, and the better commercial
cells have efficiencies of 12% or more.

Although both p-on-n and n-on-p cells were made in early laboratory
studies, the p-on-n cells gave a somewhat higher output. As a result,
all the American commercial solar cells up to 1960 were of this type,
and they were used on all satellites before Telstar I. (Russian
satellites, we believe, have used n-on-p cells from the beginning.)
The U.S. Army Signal Corps Research and Development 65
Laboratory, however, decided to make both p-on-n and n-on-p
cells and compare their performance. This laboratory work led to a
surprising discovery: The n-on-p cells were several times as resistant
to energetic particle radiation as were comparable p-on-n cells.
These results were announced in 1960, and confirmed by our
measurements and those of other laboratories. The timing was very
fortunate, since we had just learned of the greatly increased
radiation hazards presented by the Van Allen belts.

Finding Out About Radiation Damage

Now, having given you a very brief account of how a solar cell works,
let us return to our three-part problem. The first objective was to
study all the aspects of radiation damage. To do this, we had to find
out how much radiation the Telstar satellite would encounter; we
needed to estimate the concentration of high-energy particles—both
electrons and protons—at various altitudes and locations. Several
government agencies are now carrying on research in this important
area, but at the time of the Telstar I launch we did not know exactly
how much radiation the satellite would run into. And the high-altitude
nuclear explosion of July 9, 1962 (the day before Telstar I went into
orbit) may have increased the quantity of high-energy electrons
injected into its path.

We also wanted to find out whether electrons and protons would do

the same damage to solar cells. Several kinds of cells were exposed
at Bell Laboratories and at various university research laboratories to
a wide range of radiation dosages. The experiments showed,
generally, that the damage effects of electrons and protons should be
about the same. Although protons are 1840 times as massive as
electrons, there are a great many more electrons in the Van Allen
belts, so that an unprotected solar cell would be much more likely to
be injured by electrons than by protons.
In fact, we found that the Van Allen belt protons have so much
energy that they can go through transparent shielding material as
much as several centimeters thick and still damage a solar cell. Thus,
to screen our cells from protons we would need very thick
transparent cover plates, and this added weight would be intolerable.
So we decided to use no proton shielding at all.

With electrons, the situation is different; they are much lighter and
have much less energy. Also, if their energy is reduced below a
certain level (about 180 thousand electron volts) electrons will not be
able to knock silicon atoms out of position, and thus cannot harm a
solar cell. We experimented with a number of different kinds and
thicknesses of cover plates, and found that transparent material with
a mass of 0.3 gram per square centimeter would slow down
electrons enough to make them no problem.

Another radiation study helped us take advantage of the fact that

solar cells respond differently to light of different wave lengths. If the
surface layer of a cell is extremely thin, it will absorb blue, green,
and yellow light well, but may be much less sensitive to the deeply
penetrating red and infrared waves. We experimented with n-on-p
cells having very shallow p-n junctions, exposing them to an
extremely strong radiation dosage. The cells still responded very well
to blue and green light, even though most of their response to
infrared and red light was lost. These findings convinced us that we
should work to make our new cells as blue-green sensitive as
possible, since they were going to be exposed to heavy radiation.

66
Designing and Making the Best Solar Cells

After it was discovered that the n-on-p cell was more resistant to
radiation, we decided to make an all-out effort to develop an n-on-p
cell that could be manufactured in quantity for our new satellite.
Since we didn’t know whether we could solve this problem in time to
meet the Telstar I launch date, we “hedged” by designing the new n-
on-p cells to be the same physical size (one by two centimeters) as
conventional p-on-n cells. Thus, if the n-on-p project hit a snag, we
probably could use regular p-on-n cells.

As you can imagine, making a solar cell to fit the very high
requirements we had set for the Telstar satellite is not an easy job—
and making these cells by the thousands is even more of a task.
During October, November, and December of 1960 we carried on a
crash program in which we made hundreds of experimental cells in
our laboratories, using a variety of materials and many different
manufacturing techniques.

We perfected a phosphorus diffusion process to develop the very thin

n-layer (about one forty-thousandth of an inch thick) that we needed
for our special blue-sensitive n-on-p cells. We also had to devise an
entirely new way to attach the metallic contacts to the highly
polished surfaces of our cells, using a combination of titanium and
silver.

Some tricky manufacturing problems also had to be solved once the

Western Electric Company began to make the large quantity of cells
needed for the Telstar program. For example, during the diffusion of
the n-layer of the cell, the silicon slice is surrounded by phosphorus
pentoxide vapor, which covers the entire slice with an “n-skin.” This
skin must be removed from the bottom of the cell by etching or grit
blasting before the p-contact is applied. Another difficult problem
occurred when we decided to give our cells an anti-reflection coating.
Because polished silicon has a refractive index near 4 and space has
an index of 1, silicon will reflect about 34% of visible light from the
sun. However, if we apply an anti-reflection layer onto the silicon this
percentage of reflection can be considerably decreased. We found
that the best substance for this purpose was a layer of silicon
monoxide only three-millionths of an inch thick. But it was only after
quite a bit of trouble—and scrapping several thousand cells—that we
were able to get this coating to adhere properly in the right
thickness.
Mounting the Cells on the Satellite

The third part of our problem had to do with finding the best ways to
mount and protect the cells on the Telstar satellite itself. Since a
satellite’s solar power plant usually has several thousand cells, we
find it best to mount the cells in groups, or modules. These can be
pretested as a unit after individual interconnections have been made.
For Telstar I, we decided to mount the 3600 solar cells in 12-cell
modules like those shown in the figure below.

67
The satellite uses 300 modules of twelve solar cells, in
groups of six or three modules per facet.
 68

Lengthwise diagram of a solar cell module, showing how

individual cells were fixed in place.

Each of the cells has a top contact along one edge and a bottom
contact all over its base, so we were able to assemble the 12-cell
groups like shingles, with the bottom edge of one cell covering the
top edge of the next, leaving only the active area of each cell
exposed. But this meant that each module would be over four inches
long and only 14 thousandths of an inch thick—far too weak to
withstand stress and vibration. To support the cells, we decided to
mount them on a metallized ceramic base. But this presented a
problem: If the cells were soldered directly to the base, the different
thermal expansion rates of the silicon and the ceramic would cause
the structure to break during the cycles of extreme changes in
temperature that Telstar would pass through. We remedied this by
connecting each cell to the ceramic support by a thin U-shaped strip
of silver (see above). Since silver has a much higher thermal
expansion coefficient than silicon, we added tiny sandwiches of Nilvar
or Invar (36% nickel, 64% iron) where the cells were attached. With
this mounting method, the cell modules withstood thermal and
mechanical shocks much more severe than those they would
undergo in actual use. In one test, for instance, an entire cell module
with its cover plates was first dipped in hot water, then plunged into
liquid nitrogen at a temperature of -195° Centigrade. In orbit, the
temperature range for the satellite was not expected to be more than
from +80° to -100°C, with a rate of change of no more than three
degrees a minute.

Finally, we needed to find the right kind of transparent protective

cover for the Telstar solar cells, both to keep micrometeorites from
damaging the sensitive and very thin diffused layer and to slow down
the incoming electrons to nondestructive energy levels. For
micrometeorite protection, only a thin layer of hard transparent
substance was needed; for electron protection, the cover plates
should have a mass of no less than 0.3 gram per square centimeter
(as we explained above). And there were two other important
considerations: The material we used should not be darkened or
discolored by prolonged exposure to ultraviolet radiation, and it
should have good thermal conductance, so that some of the heat
absorbed by the solar cells could be conducted out to the cover
plates and re-radiated. All these requirements led us to the 69
choice of clear, man-made sapphire. Although sapphire is more
expensive and difficult to make than the equivalent quartz or glass, it
only has to be 30 mils (three hundreds of an inch) thick. Twice this
thickness would be required if quartz or glass were used.

We have had space to describe only a few of the things involved in

designing a solar cell power plant that would work unattended out in
space. We have not mentioned a good many of the tough problems
that had to be worked on. But we are glad to report that we could
find answers to almost all our questions. And the most significant
answer is shown in the figure below, where you can see how the
Telstar I solar power plant slowly diminished in power almost exactly
as we predicted it would.
Very gradual decay due to radiation effects of the Telstar I
solar cell plant in the first months after the satellite went
into orbit; it was extremely close to the predicted rate
(solid line).

Kenneth D. Smith was born in Galesburg, Illinois, and received a

B.A. from Pomona College in 1928 and an M.A. from Dartmouth
College in 1930. He joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1930,
and has worked on the development of proximity fuzes, radar
bombing systems, broadband microwave radio systems, and
various semiconductor devices, including radiation-resistant solar
cells for the Telstar satellite.

70
 CASE HISTORY NO. 5
Would Time Delay Be a Problem in Using a
Synchronous Satellite?

Peter D. Bricker
Psychologist—Member of Staff, Behavioral Research Laboratory

THE PROBLEM

One of the satellite communications systems that has been proposed

would make use of stationary synchronous satellites. These would be
precisely located above the earth’s equator in orbits 22,300 miles
high, where they would circle the earth once every 24 hours, and
thus appear to remain stationary over a point on the earth. There are
several advantages to this type of system—the most important being
that we would need only three satellites for communications between
almost all the inhabited regions of the earth.

On the other hand, there are several problems in establishing a

synchronous system. Just getting the satellites into exactly the right
places and keeping them in position is a formidable one. We also
have something of a mystery to contend with, because of the
tremendous distances that would be involved. Although we can
communicate at speeds close to that of light—186,000 miles per
second—we cannot go any faster than that. You might think that
186,000 miles a second was fast enough for us, and most of the time
it is. However, if you send signals 22,300 miles up into the sky,
transmit them back to earth, perhaps send them up again to a
second satellite, and finally bring them 22,300 miles back down to
earth, even the speed of light may not be fast enough. The delay will
be only about a second or so, but it may—for some kinds of
communications—be long enough to cause trouble. How much
trouble, we don’t yet know.

For one-way signals such as television, a transmission delay of about

one second obviously makes little or no difference. But for two-way
conversations on the telephone, where there is rapid back-and-forth
talking, even this tiny amount of time delay may be a problem. And
then again, it may not be. There have been a lot of experiments to
find out something about this delay problem, and these have given
us a lot of different answers. Work is still going on, and there is still
much to find out. In this chapter, we tell you about one small, early
experiment. Its results were not conclusive, but they should give you
one example of how to set up and carry out a typical experimental
study on human behavior.

71