9/12/21, 7: 56 pm Chronic Experimentation | Somatosphere Page 1 of 5 http://somatosphere.net/2021/chronic-experimentation.html/ A collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics. This article is part of the series: Chronic living (http://somatosphere.net/series/chronic-living/) February 26, 2021 (http://somatosphere.net/2021/chronic-experimentation.html/) Chronic Experimentation (http://somatosphere.net/2021/chronic- experimentation.html/) By Kane Race (http://somatosphere.net/author/kane-race/) The introduction of effective combination antiretroviral therapy for HIV disease in 1996 was commonly narrated as a major event that transformed HIV from an inevitable death sentence into a ‘chronic manageable illness’ – at least for those populations in wealthier countries granted socially and economically affordable access to the new treatments, not to mention the relevant clinical infrastructures to monitor their effectiveness such as regular viral load testing. Sociologists cast this moment as the beginning of the normalization of responses to HIV/AIDS, in which activist engagements with HIV science on the part of affected communities resolved into the figure of the patient, or the passive consumer of medical goods (Rosenbrock et al. 2000). While the reframing of HIV as a chronic manageable illness can certainly be understood in terms of normalization, in this post I argue this narrative overlooks the sense in which the ‘Protease Moment’ (Rofes 2015) was predicated upon and instigated various forms of labour on the part of people living with HIV/AIDS that entailed experimentation with drugs and their diverse affordances. Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby have coined the term ‘clinical labour’ to account for forms of embodied labour that are central to biomedical innovation but ‘rarely considered as labour’ – such as participation in clinical trials (Cooper and Waldby 2014). From this perspective, the mass participation in clinical research to test the efficacy and affordances of HIV antiretroviral drugs on the part of affected communities, not to mention the contestation of clinical trial protocols and regulatory practices on the part of community treatment activists, documented so well by Steven Epstein (1996), are surely part of prehistory of the protease moment. But Cooper and Waldby’s provocation can be taken further if we consider the forms of labour that take place outside the official frameworks of clinical research but tacitly inform its propositions and hypotheses: what I call experimental labour. As John Dewey remarks of thinking, experimental labour is precipitated when ‘life is so hemmed in and constricted that [one] cannot directly carry through a course of action to victorious consummation,’ (2004 [1948]: 80; see Savransky 2017). It aims towards ‘the construction of a new empirical situation in which objects are differently related to one another’ and in which a course of action becomes newly possible (Dewey 2008 [1929]: 16). The Protease Moment sparked a wave of interest, concern, anxiety, and intrigue the use of ‘drug cocktails’ on the part of gay men, as I have discussed elsewhere (Race 2009, Race 2021a). Emerging at first as a shorthand term for combination therapy involving protease inhibitors, the phrase ‘the new drug cocktails’ soon extended in popular parlance to encompass a range of licit and Science, Medicine, and Anthropology