-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of [log in to unmask]
Sent: 02 February 2006 23:03
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CTHEORY] 1000 Days of Theory: Hypervirus: A Clinical Report
_____________________________________________________________________
CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 29, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
1000 Days 031 02/02/2006 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
_____________________________________________________________________
*************************
1000 DAYS OF THEORY
*************************
_____________________________________________________________________
Hypervirus: A Clinical Report
==========================================
~Thierry Bardini~
And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it's moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past.[1]
-- Leonard Cohen, "Everybody Knows."
The high degree to which AIDS, terrorism, crack cocaine or
computer viruses mobilize the popular imagination should tell us
that they are more than anecdotal occurrences in an irrational
world. The fact is that they contain within them the logic of
our system: these events are merely the spectacular expression
of that system. They all hew to the same agenda of virulence and
radiation, an agenda whose very power over the imagination is of
a viral character.[2]
-- Jean Baudrillard, "Prophylaxy and Virulence."
At the dawn of capitalism's fourth phase, the hypervirus awoke.
Poisonous parasite, undead, ubiquitous and omnipotent.
At the beginning of the 1980s, the logistic curve of the hypervirus
(the "virus" virus) passed its first critical point (i.e. second
order inflexion). Materializing the cybernetic convergence of carbon
and silicon, it infected computers and humans alike at unprecedented
levels. From this point on, an explosive diffusion in "postmodern
culture" emerged, eventually it plateaued near saturation, redefining
culture as a viral ecology. Room for one more inside, Sir.
TRUE/FALSE but REMARKABLE IDENTITIES:
"Virus" is a virus: virus is a reflexive name.
The virus is the quintessential Kantian thing-in-itself.
The hypervirus is the quintessential Dawkinsian meme.
(Your clone is the idealized expression of your viral self).
The postmodern master equation:
LANGUAGE = VIRUS = INFORMATIONAL PARASITE
Baudrillard adds the corollary proposition:
Anathematic Illimited / Transfatal Express
Viral Incorporated / International Epidemics
The hypervirus rules our times like an indifferent despot (it
practices liberal indifference). It is the ultimate boot sector
parasite of our undead culture. Theorized, from Derrida to Foucault
(who died of it), Baudrillard (passim [3]) and Deleuze, the virus is
the master trope of "postmodern culture" (whatever that is).[4] Let
us sketch rapidly the progression of the pandemics.[5]
In his Cut-Ups trilogy of the first half of the 1960s (_The Soft
Machine_, _The Ticket that Exploded_ and _Nova Express_), William
Burroughs experimented with the stuff of words; in the early 1970s,
Susumu Ohno coined the expression "junk DNA" Burroughs eventually
synthesized the experiment into one fundamental thesis: language (and
especially written language) is a virus.[6] At approximately the same
time, the "computer virus" appeared in science-fiction literature.
William S. Burroughs is ~patient 0~ of the hypervirus, the original
vector. It is an ironic corollary of his own thesis that the
hypervirus was first detected in his writings. In _The Electronic
Revolution_, he writes:
I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or as
acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison. It
will be seen that the falsifications of syllabic western
languages are in point of fact actual virus mechanisms. The IS
of identity the purpose of a virus is to SURVIVE. To survive at
any expense to the host invaded. To be an animal, to be a body.
To be an animal body that the virus can invade. To be animals,
to be bodies. To be more animal bodies, so that the virus can
move from one body to another. To stay present as an animal
body, to stay absent as antibody or resistance to the body
invasion.[7]
Relevant here is an extended version of Deleuze's notion of the
overman. The virus, more efficient than the overman, is not only "in
charge of the animals" (As in Deleuze and Guattari's version), but
actually is the animal. This use of the verb "to be" is, of course,
highly problematic for Burroughs, to the point that it is quite
accurate to consider him the detective-doctor of the antiviral fight.
[8] For Burroughs, the principals of this fight begin with a reform
of language itself, in the "therapeutic" tradition of Count Alfred
Korzybski's non-Aristotelian semantics, whose seminar he attended in
the late 1930s:
The categorical THE is also a virus mechanism, locking you in
THE virus universe. EITHER/OR is another virus formula. It is
always you OR the virus. EITHER/OR. This is in point of fact the
conflict formula, which is seen to be archetypical virus
mechanism. The proposed language will delete these virus
mechanisms and make them impossible of formulation in the
language. This language will be a tonal language like Chinese,
it will also have a hieroglyphic script as pictorial as possible
without being to (sic) cumbersome or difficult to write. This
language will give one option of silence. When not talking, the
user of this language can take in the silent images of the
written, pictorial and symbol languages. [9]
For Burroughs, the first enemy in language is the "IS of identity":
"The word BE in the English language contains, as a virus contains,
its precoded message of damage, the categorial imperative of
permanent condition" (ibid.). Instead, Burroughs follows the advice
of Korzybski, which is to reform language as a pictorial (iconic)
language where silence is an option. Silence is understood here as
the first step in the dissolution of the modern subject (i.e. the
egoistic subject [10], from Descartes on). Thus, where Simon and
Garfunkel innocently sing, "fool said I you do not know, silence like
a cancer grows" -- today South Park echoes, "Die Hippie Die!"
During the same general period, a philosophical project develops that
mirrors the work of Burroughs. Between _Of Grammatology_ (1967) and
_Dissemination_ (1972), Jacques Derrida begins a philosophical
enterprise that attempts to introduce the Other into the I: a
redefinition of the subject. Eventually, this "introduction" becomes
"infection", and the Other is radically recast as the virus. Like
Burroughs, Derrida first finds traces of the process in writing
itself:
The absolute alterity of writing might nevertheless affect
living speech, from the outside, within its inside: alter it
[for the worse]. Even as it has an independent history (...) and
in spite of the inequalities of development, the play of
structural correlations, writing marks the history of speech.
Although it is born out of "needs of a different kind" and
"according to circumstances entirely independent of the duration
of that people," although these needs might "never have
occurred," the irruption of this absolute contingency determined
the interior of an essential history and affected the interior
unity of a life, literally infected it. It is the strange
essence of the supplement not to have essentiality: it may
always not have taken place. Moreover, literally, it has never
taken place: it is never present, here and now. If it were, it
would not be what it is, a supplement, taking and keeping the
place of the other. What alters for the worse the living nerve
of language . . . has therefore above all not taken place. Less
than nothing and yet, to judge by its effects, much more than
nothing. The supplement is neither a presence nor an absence. No
ontology can think its operation.[11]
Derrida's claim that "no ontology" can think this operation is
questionable as it disregards the possibility of viral ontology. [12]
The question remains whether we could create, following Korzybski and
his students, a non-Aristotelian ontology -- an ontology of the
immaterial supplement. Of course, Derrida later recognizes the
dominance of the virus:
All I have done ... is dominated by the thought of a virus, what
could be called a parasitology, a virology, the virus being many
things.... The virus is in part a parasite that destroys, that
introduces disorder into communication. Even from the biological
standpoint, this is what happens with a virus; it derails a
mechanism of the communicational type, its coding and decoding.
On the other hand, it is something that is neither living nor
non-living; the virus is not a microbe. And if you follow these
two threads, that of a parasite which disrupts destination from
the communicative point of view -- disrupting writing,
inscription, and the coding and decoding of inscription -- and
which on the other hand is neither alive nor dead, you have the
matrix of all that I have done since I began writing. [13]
In 1976, Richard Dawkins (over)extends his (selfish) gene concept,
into a number of notions: (re)birth of the meme, the other
replicator, ~toujours le meme~. Dawkins renews a nineteenth century
image contemporary to the Darwinian synthesis, the contagion of
ideas, by reinvigorating its vocabulary: "when you plant a fertile
meme in my mind you literally paralyze my brain, turning it into a
vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may
parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell." [14] Indeed, the
virus appears as the excluded third term that makes the analogy
between gene and meme possible:
There are many ways of defining the meme but there are two that
we should perhaps take particularly seriously. First, Dawkins,
who coined the term meme, described memes as units of cultural
transmission which "propagate themselves in the meme pool by ...
a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation"
(Dawkins, 1976 p 192). Second, the Oxford English Dictionary
defines a meme as follows: "meme (mi:m), n. Biol. (shortened
from mimeme ... that which is imitated, after GENE n.). An
element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by
non-genetic means, esp. imitation". Both these definitions
include the critical point that memes are cultural information
that is copied, and that it is copied by imitation (...) There
is a long history of research on imitation in both animal
behaviour and human social psychology (...) In the nineteenth
century Darwin collected many examples of what he took to be
imitation in animals, as did Romanes (1882, 1883) but they did
not define what they meant by imitation. Baldwin (1902) gave
imitation a central role in his theories of evolution, pointing
out that all adaptive processes can be seen as imitative -
perhaps foreshadowing the universal Darwinism that today enables
comparisons between biological evolution and memetic evolution
(e.g. Dawkins, 1976; Plotkin, 1993). [15]
Dawkins later makes the point even clearer, by referring to certain
memes (religious ones) as mind viruses (1993), and so opening the
door to countless (ab)uses of the metaphor. That same year, a final
critical point (second second order inflexion point) is passed,
diffusion is now bound to saturation: the hypervirus is now, in
Nirvana's words, In Utero. To quote from Nirvana's (very Bataillan)
song "Milk it": "I am my own parasite / I don't need a host to live /
(...) / I own my own pet virus / I get to pet and name her / Her milk
is my shit / My shit is her milk." But I am getting ahead of myself
here; It might be paradoxically better to return to the false heavens
of chronology in order to describe the epidemics of the timeless
entity.
In 1981 -- Elk Cloner, the first computer virus in the wild (i.e.
affecting PCs), is documented, although early hackers will tell you
that there were programs analog to what we now call "viruses" in the
late 1960s or early 1970s. [16] Elk Cloner predated the experimental
work that "officially" defined computer viruses and spread on Apple
II. [17] When infected, the monitor of the computer displayed the
following rhyme: It will get on all your disks / It will infiltrate
your chips / Yes it's Cloner! / It will stick to you like glue / It
will modify ram too / Send in the Cloner!
In 1982 -- the first global epidemics of the fourth phase officially
begins: the name AIDS, for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is
coined in August of that year. AIDS would soon become the syndrome of
choice to synthesize and metaphorize the "postmodern condition." It
eventually appears as the final term in a series of diseases playing
this part in our culture: plague-tuberculosis-cancer-AIDS. Room for
one more inside, Sir.
This sequence corresponds term for term to the sequence of the four
phases of capitalism: plague is the archaic and thus the archetypical
disease (Girard); tuberculosis is the plague that corresponds to the
second phase of capitalism (mechanized capitalism), and cancer the
disease of the societies of control:
Early capitalism assumes the necessity of regulated spending,
saving, accounting, discipline -- an economy that depends on the
rational limitation of desire. TB is described in images that
sum the negative behavior of nineteenth century ~homo
economicus~: consumption; wasting; squandering of vitality.
Advanced capitalism requires expansion, speculation, the
creation of new needs (the problem of satisfaction and
dissatisfaction); buying on credit; mobility -- an economy that
depends on the irrational indulgence of desire. Cancer is
described in images that sum up the negative behavior of
twentieth century ~homo economicus~: abnormal growth; repression
of energy, that is refusal to consume or spend. [18]
In this quote, Susan Sontag relates both diseases to an economy of
desire. There is a profound resonance here with Rene Girard's notion
of mimetic desire, [19] a resonance that also evokes Richard
Dawkins's recycling of the nineteenth century socio-biologies of
imitation. [20] Both, again, were products of the same period, the
second oil crisis of international capitalism in the mid 1970s.
In the viral ontology of the postmodern condition (capitalism of the
fourth kind), the undifferentiating crime is ascribed to the radical
Other that is the virus. Metaphorically speaking, the Other then
becomes a virus. Derrida is quoted by a web author as saying that all
he has done ... is dominated by the thought of a virus; the same
author concludes that Derrida is a virus. The unbearable feedback of
the becoming virus... "Berlusconi is a retrovirus," writes Lorenzo
Miglioli, and he adds, in the most synthetic expression of the viral
horrors of history: "The Holy Inquisition (knowledge as a form of
extortion), Nazism (knowledge as a form of indirect extortion, as an
experiment), Pol-Pot (knowledge as a form of erasing/extermination of
the actors for the sake of the scene) are pure and simple
transcriptions, horror vacui translated into horror written on the
flesh." [21] G. W. Bush is a virus, Saddam Hussein is a virus, and
bin Laden is a virus. Room for one more inside, Sir.
In 1983 -- On November 3, the first "official" computer virus is
conceived of as an experiment to be presented at a weekly seminar on
computer security. Fred Cohen first introduced the concept in this
seminar, and his PhD supervisor, Len Adleman, proposes the name
"virus". In his presentation, Cohen defines a computer virus as "a
computer program that can affect other computer programs by modifying
them in such a way as to include a (possibly evolved) copy of
itself," a definition he would stick to in his subsequent paper, [22]
and one that would become the official definition of a "computer
virus". Cohen produces such an "infection" within a Unix
directory-listing utility, proving that identifying and isolating
computer viruses is a non-computable problem. This later result,
maybe the most crucial point in Cohen's work, meant that fighting the
infection is therefore impossible to achieve using an algorithm, and
one is left with the same aporia that philosophers have diagnosed.
According to Cohen, the first use of the term virus to refer to an
unwanted computer code occurred in David Gerrold's 1972 science
fiction novel, _When Harley Was One_. In an interview, Len Adleman
concurred with Cohen: "The term 'computer virus' existed in science
fiction well before Fred Cohen and I came along. Several authors
actually used that term in science fiction prior to 1983. I don't
recall ever having seen it, perhaps it was just a term whose time had
come. So I did not invent the term. I just named what we now consider
computer viruses 'computer viruses.'" [23] Indeed, it was a term
whose time had come! And the convergence was not fortuitous:
A few years later, while reading about the AIDS virus and its
effect on T-cells, Adleman thought about a mathematical
description of immunitary deficiency. As certain cells were
depleted, he realized, other cells -- similar in type but not in
function -- increased proportionately. Adleman's hypothesis
offered not only an explanation for how AIDS destroys the immune
system, but pointed toward a method of treatment. If the
population of the unaffected cell type (T-8s) could be
artificially reduced, he reasoned, the homeostatic forces at
work in the immune system would cause an increase in T-4s -- the
depleted cell types. [24]
In 1986 -- the diffusion curve of the hypervirus passes its first
order inflexion point, and the hypervirus thus becomes mainstream.
That year, two Pakistani programmers replace the executable code in
the boot sector of a floppy disk with their own viral code designed
to infect 360kb floppies accessed on any drive. Their "Brain virus"
(infected floppies had "(c) Brain" for a volume label) becomes the
first recorded virus to infect PCs running MS-DOS. It is also the
first "stealth" virus, meaning it attempts to hide itself from
detection. If a computer user tried to view the infected space on the
disk, 'Brain' would display the original, uninfected boot sector.
Clearly, writers such as Burroughs and Derrida anticipated this form
of dialectics of presence/absence. That same year, the performance
artist Laurie Anderson turns William Burroughs's original insight
mainstream:
Paradise / Is exactly like / Where you are right now / Only
much much Better / I saw this guy on the train / And he seemed
to have gotten stuck / In one of those abstract trances. / And
he was going: "Ugh... Ugh... Ugh..." / And Fred said: / I think
he's in some kind of pain. I think it's a pain cry. / And I
said: "Pain cry? / Then language is a virus." Language! It's a
virus! / Language! It's a virus! [25]
One year later, AIDS turns mainstream too, thanks to a "hit" from
Prince:
Oh yeah / In France a skinny man / Died of a big disease with a
little name / By chance his girlfriend came across a needle /
And soon she did the same / At home there are seventeen-year-old
boys / And their idea of fun / Is being in a gang called the
disciples / High on crack, totin' a machine gun. [26]
As in this song, the syndrome, however, is still restricted to
certain stigmatized groups (homosexuals, junkies, etc.). At first,
indeed, the syndrome is dubbed "the gay cancer." Contrary to the
other three diseases associated with prior phases of capitalism, it
is highly significant that the main mode of AIDS transmission occurs
by sexual contact. In 1988, Susan Sontag already understands this, as
she follows her original essay on Cancer and "Illness and Metaphor"
with an update focusing on AIDS. She writes: "The sexual transmission
of this illness, considered by most people as a calamity one brings
on oneself, is judged more harshly than other means -- especially
since AIDS is understood as a disease not only of sexual excess but
of perversity." [27] This notion is quite well expressed in a song by
the Pet Shop Boys, which is also released in 1987:
Now it almost seems impossible/ We've drunk too much, and woke
up everyone / I may be wrong, I thought we said / It couldn't
happen here / I don't expect to talk in terms of sense / Our
dignity and injured innocence / It contradicts your
battle-scars / Still healed, so far. [28]
And the Boss (Bruce Springsteen) concurs, some years later, when the
time is ripe for a cinematographic representation of an AIDS patient
(as a white lawyer): "Oh brother are you gonna leave me / Wastin'
away / On the streets of Philadelphia." [29] The year before, 1300
computer viruses were recorded, an increase of 420% from December
1990. By November 1990, one new virus was discovered each week.
Today, between 10 and 15 new viruses appear every day. In fact, from
December 1998 to October 1999, the total virus count jumped from
20,500 to 42,000. Perhaps soon we will stop counting; we have spyware
now, and that too was anticipated by Burroughs:
It is worth noting that if a virus were to attain a state of
wholly benign equilibrium with its host cell it is unlikely that
its presence would be readily detected OR THAT IT WOULD
NECESSARILY BE RECOGNIZED AS A VIRUS. I suggest that the word is
just such a virus. [30]
It is worth noting that the ambiguity that surrounds the hypervirus
is essential to its functioning as the master trope of the postmodern
condition. If AIDS is the syndrome of choice to concretize the
hypervirus in postmodern culture, it should be noted that, contrary
to the three diseases associated with prior kinds of capitalism, AIDS
is not a disease, but a syndrome. AIDS is the name of a medical
condition associated with a wide spectrum of diseases that are
usually assumed to be the consequences of the HIV infection. However,
this very point is still the subject of controversy. Even if most of
the medical and scientific community accepts today that AIDS results
from the HIV infection, this is not a proven fact, and some say (e.g.
the group of Perth; Kary Mullis, 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry) that
it is only still a hypothesis, and a bad one at that. [31] To borrow
a term from computer science, AIDS/HIV is a stealth virus. Rather
than a mere epiphenomenon of big science, I consider this point as a
crucial characteristic of the hypervirus.
Today, the postmodern has turned ambiguity upside-down with
injunctions like "Embrace your viruses!", or, even more, "Embrace
yourself as a virus." Steven Shaviro, in his "Two Lessons from
Burroughs", proposed such a "biological approach to postmodernism",
and offered violent viral replications and insect strategies such as
swarming as models. [32] In a Deleuzian fashion, Shaviro suggested
that learn about the other by becoming other; furthermore, by posing
"the question of radical otherness in biological terms, instead of
epistemological ones.... resolving such a problem would involve the
transfer, not of minds, but of DNA." [33] Deleuze and Guattari refer
to this transfer as "aparallel", more recently it has been termed
"lateral."
No moribund humanist ideologies will release us from this
dilemma. Precisely by virtue of their obsolescence, calls to
subjective agency, or to collective imagination and
mobilization, merely reinforce the feedback loops of normalizing
power. For it is precisely by regulating and punishing
ourselves, internalizing the social functions of policing and
control, that we arrive at the strange notion that we are
producing our own proper language, speaking for ourselves.
Burroughs instead proposes a stranger, more radical strategy:
"As you know inoculation is the weapon of choice against virus
and inoculation can only be effected through exposure." For all
good remedies are homeopathic. We need to perfect our own habits
of parasitism, and ever more busily frequent the habitations of
our dead, in the knowledge that every self-perpetuating and
self-extending system ultimately encounters its own limits, its
own parasites. Let us become dandies of garbage (...) Let us
stylize, enhance, and accelerate the processes of viral
replication: for thereby we increase the probability of
mutation. In Burroughs' vision, "the virus plagues empty whole
continents. At the same time new species arise with the same
rapidity since the temporal limits on growth have been
removed... The biologic bank is open." It's now time to spend
freely, to mortgage ourselves beyond our means. [34]
What was formerly seen as a problem, or even a stigma, is now
portrayed as a path to Freedom, in a highly paradoxical statement
strongly reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's Gnostic theodicy. For the
ambivalence, of course, remains. As I write these lines, my native
country is agitated by the aftershocks of the declarations of a
comedian who has proved (again) that anti-Semitism is still practiced
there. This man, whose name translates ironically into English as
"God-given", has quite simply actualized the cultural ambivalence of
the hypervirus' total diffusion in an aphorism equating Zionism with
"the AIDS of Judaism."
I am reminded here of the famous characterization of my own
generation by Louis Pawels, in an editorial for _Le Figaro_ in December
1986, as "suffering from mental AIDS." As we were demonstrating in
the streets against one more reform of the educational system, Pawels
wrote that we, "the children of stupid rock, the pupils of
pedagogical vulgarity", had "lost our natural immunities." [35] Those
viruses that were supposed to infect us were, of course, "mind
viruses", as Dawkins would say. By the time Pawels passed his
judgment on my generation, AIDS was definitely going mainstream and
"low culture" (i.e. rock n'roll & vulgar pedagogy) had rejoined sex
and drugs to complete the list of the symptoms of the hyperviral
infection. Most of us shrugged, laughing, and passed the joint...
only to realize, a few years later, that the guy was one of the
bouncers at the doors of perception, French style.
Today, such metaphorical uses of AIDS are so common that nobody seems
to notice them anymore. A little Googling generates the following
instances from the web: AIDS as a metaphor for violence, apathy,
fear, loneliness, colonialism, globalization, pollution, ecological
collapse, homosexuality, the opposing basketball team (!), the
corruption and betrayal of the masses, chronic illness, the social
and political deterioration of a fictional country, the general loss
of moral standards, the conflicts tearing at American society at the
turn of the millennium, the American condition, inequities, social
decay, or merely "how the world works." Room for one more inside,
Sir.
There is one more crucial way in which today's troubled times are
understood through the AIDS metaphor: terrorism as a consequence of
"metaphysical AIDS." This one we owe to Jacques Derrida. [36] In an
interview with Giovanna Borradori that took place in the wake of
9/11, he develops this thesis: terrorism is the latest symptom of
(occidental) suicidal autoimmunity. [37] Borradori notes quite
interestingly that Derrida began his reflection on the mechanism of
autoimmunization during the winter of 1994, "in connection with a
study of the concept of religion, which frames his discussion of
religious fundamentalism and its role in global terrorism." [38] And
Derrida agrees, referencing a text written during that period:
In analyzing "this terrifying but inescapable logic of the
autoimmunity of the unscathed that will always associate Science
and Religion," I there proposed to extend to life in general the
figure of an autoimmunity whose meaning or origin first seemed
to be limited to so-called natural life or to life pure and
simple, to what is believed to be the purely "zoological,"
"biological," or "genetic" (...)Since we are speaking here of
terrorism and, thus, of terror, the most irreducible source of
absolute terror, the one that, by definition, finds itself most
defenseless before the worst threat would be the one that comes
from "within," from this zone where the worst "outside" lives
with or within "me." My vulnerability is thus, by definition and
by structure, by situation, without limit. Whence the terror.
[39]
Notably, 1994 is the same year that Derrida realized that all his
prior work from _On Grammatology_ on could be reinterpreted as a kind
of virology. Susan Sontag writes about the same process: "In the
description of AIDS the enemy is what causes the disease, an
infectious agent that comes form the outside (...) Next the invader
takes up permanent residence, by a form of alien takeover familiar in
science-fiction narratives. The body's own cells become the invader
[...] What makes the viral assault so terrifying is that
contamination, and therefore vulnerability, is understood as
permanent." [40]
Why then, this elision of the virus in Derrida's account of
terrorism? Why this strange feeling that if terrorism amounts to
suicide, it is a spontaneous auto- phenomenon, with no external
agent? In his first moment of autoimmunity, Derrida provides an
answer. The aggression comes from the inside because it comes from
"forces that are apparently without any force of their own but that
are able to find the means, through ruse and the implementation of
high-tech knowledge to get hold of an American weapon in an American
airport." [41] Nevertheless, this too is characteristic of viruses.
More importantly, Derrida adds, "let us not forget that the United
States had in effect paved the way for and consolidated the forces of
the 'adversary' by training people like 'bin Laden' [...] and by
first of all creating the politico-military circumstances that would
favor their emergence." [42] While this may seem to be a form of
engineered virus, for Derrida, it is best described as doubly
suicidal.
If Derrida does not see the stigmata of the hypervirus in 9/11, it
might be because this would amount to a repetition of Jean
Baudrillard's thesis. Previous to 9/11, even before Derrida
understood that his work produces a kind of virology, Baudrillard
begins to recognize terrorism as one symptom of the hyperviral
infection (cf. my epigraph). Like Derrida, he recognizes it as the
result of a suicidal drive: "The terrorist hypothesis is that the
system itself suicides in response to the multiple challenges of
death and suicide." [43] However, unlike Derrida, Baudrillard resorts
to a viral explanation, even if it does not take the face of an
"external adversary":
Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a worldwide
perfusion of terrorism, like the shadow of any system of
domination, ready to awake everywhere as a double agent. There
is no boundary to define it [le cerner]; it is in the very core
of this culture that fights it -- and the visible schism (and
hatred) that opposes, on a global level, the exploited and the
underdeveloped against the Western world, is secretly linked to
the internal fracture of the dominant system. The latter can
face any visible antagonism. But with terrorism -- and its viral
structure --, as if every domination apparatus were creating its
own antibody [antidispositif], the chemistry of its own
disappearance; against this almost automatic reversal of its own
puissance, the system is powerless. And terrorism is the
shockwave of this silent reversal. [44]
This is exactly my point: the very core of the culture that fights
the hypervirus -- postmodern theoreticians included -- is infected by
it. Terminally. Terrorism is but one symptom -- albeit a crucial
symptom -- of the infection. It reflects the vital (and morbid)
condition of postmodernity, setting the stage for the fourth phase of
capitalism. Terrorism is the source of pain and suffering and maybe
the only sign of a future to come, a junk future. Could this future
only be death, as ~patient 0~ seemed to have concluded?
"Fight tuberculosis, folks."
Christmas Eve, an old junkie selling Christmas seals on North
Park Street.
The "Priest," they called him. "Fight tuberculosis, folks."
(...)
Then it hit him like heavy silent snow.
All the gray junk yesterdays.
He sat there received the immaculate fix.
And since he was himself a priest,
there was no need to call one. [45]
Junk is yet another name of the hypervirus: Virus and junk are
connected through the power of the image, another excluded third.
From the awakening of the hypervirus in _Nova Express_, Burroughs had
realized that "junk is concentrated image" and that "the image
material was not dead matter, but exhibited the same life cycle as
the virus." [46] All the gray junk tomorrows...
Notes:
------
[1] Leonard Cohen, "Everybody Knows." ~I'm your Man~, 1988.
[2] Jean Baudrillard, "Prophylaxy and Virulence," _The Transparency
of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena_, London: Verso, 1993, p.67.
[3] At a recent conference in Montreal, I had the opportunity to ask
Baudrillard directly about the presence of the trope of the virus in
his work. He answered that the virus was indeed a metaphor in his
mind, albeit a metaphor which "renews the terms of the analysis." He
added: "Virtuality and virality get mixed up in my mind." An apt
conceptual rephrasing of the very thesis that I wish to defend here,
under the cover of a fictional "clinical report." (Jean Baudrillard,
"La parralaxe du mal" ~Conference Terreurs, Terrorismes et Mecanismes
Inconscients~, Montreal, October 31, 2005).
[4] "One must further recognize and accept the pervasiveness of the
viral trope within postmodernism (...) and understand the ontological
confusion (and ideological anxiety) which it carries." Scott
Bukatman, _Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern
Science Fiction_, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 347.
[5] For this purpose, I will draw heavily on the terminology of
Diffusion of Innovation theory (logistic curve, inflexion points and
critical mass, etc.). Ironically enough, the logistic model of the
diffusion of innovations was originally borrowed from the field of
epidemiology (See Everett M. Rogers, _Diffusion of Innovations_,
fourth edition, New York: Free Press, 1995).
[6] Incidentally, Salvador E. Luria, Max Delbruck and Alfred D.
Hershey were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for
their work on viruses in 1969. As early as 1955, Salvador Luria had
written that "A new view of the nature of viruses is emerging. They
used to be thought of solely as foreign intruders -- strangers to
cell they invade and paratize. But recent findings, including the
discovery of host-induced modifications of viruses, emphasize more
and more the similarity of viruses to hereditary units such as genes.
Indeed, some viruses are being considered as bits of heredity in
search of a chromosome" In '50, 100 & 150 Years Ago" _Scientific
American_, April 2005, p. 18.
[7] William S. Burroughs, _The Electronic Revolution_, 1970, Expanded
Media Editions Published by Bresche Publikationen Germany, English
version available on-line at
http://www.hyperreal.org/wsb/elect-rev.html.
[8] Kathy Acker, "Returning to the Source", funeral oration for
William Burroughs, _21C_, 26 "No Future," 1998, p. 14: "He was the
detective. Being the detective, he was the doctor. He searched out
the possessors some of whose other names are viruses and junk. The
word is virus. In other words, language controls virally (...)
William spent a life-time investigating anti-viral techniques."
[9] Burroughs, _The Electronic Revolution_, op. cit.
[10] Cf. Anne-Marie Christin, _L'image ecrite, ou la deraison
graphique_, Paris : Flammarion, 2001 [1995].
[11] Jacques Derrida, _Of Grammatology_, G.C. Spivak, trans.,
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977. p. 314.
[12] Although starting from a very different standpoint, Paul Ricoeur
seems to reach a similar conclusion: "Perhaps the philosopher as
philosopher has to admit that one does not know and cannot say
whether this Other, the source of the injunction, is another person
whom I can look in the face or who can stare at me, or my ancestors
for whom there is no representation, to so great an extent does my
debt to them constitute my very self, or God -- living God, absent
God -- or an empty place. With the aporia of the Other, philosophical
discourse comes to an end." _Oneself as Another_, Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1992, p. 355. Here I am tempted to spell injunction
with a "k" and see the virus as its original source.
[13] Derrida, Jacques with Brunette, Peter and Wills, David, "The
Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida." In _Deconstruction
and the Visual Arts: Art, Media Architecture_. Brunette, Peter and
Wills, David (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p.
12.
[14] Dawkins, _The Selfish Gene_, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989 [1976], p. 192.
[15] Susan Blackmore, "Imitation and the definition of a meme",
_Journal of Memetics_ , Evolutionary Models of Information
Transmission, 2, 1998.
http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/1998/vol2/balckmore_s.html. Referred to in
this citation are: Richards Dawkins, _The Selfish Gene_, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1976; G.J. Romanes, _Animal Intelligence_,
London: Kegan Paul Trench, 1882; J.M. Baldwin, _Development and
Evolution_, New York: MacMillan, 1902; H. Plotkin, _Darwin Machines
and the Nature of Knowledge_, Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1993.
[16] There are instances of "viral infections" documented for the
Univac 1108 and the IBM 360/370 ("Pervading Animal" and "Christmas
tree").
[17] For more info on Elk Cloner see http://www.skrenta.com/cloner/.
[18] Susan Sontag, "Illness as Metaphor", in _Illness as Metaphor and
AIDS and its Metaphors_, London: Picador, 1990 [1978], p. 63.
[19] See _Des choses cachees depuis la fondation du monde_, Paris:
Grasset, 1978 and _Le Bouc Emissaire_, Paris: Grasset, 1982.
[20] Gabriel de Tarde, _Les lois de l'imitation_, for instance.
[21] Lorenzo Miglioli, "Berlusconi is a retrovirus: from the Italian
theory-fiction novel" in Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, eds., _Digital
Delirium_, Montreal, New World Perspectives, 1997, 145-151, p. 145.
[22] Frederic Cohen, "Computer Viruses - Theory and Experiments",
DOD/NBS 7th Conference on Computer Security, originally appearing in
IFIP-sec 84, also appearing in "Computers and Security", V6(1987),
pp22-35 and other publications in several languages
http://vx.netlux.org/lib/afc01.html
[23] "Innerview",
http://www.scu.edu.cn/waim03/scu_cs/teach/adleman.htm.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Laurie Anderson, "Language is a Virus", ~Home of the Brave~,
1986.
[26] Prince, "Signs O' The Times", ~Signs O' The Times~, 1987.
[27] Susan Sontag, "AIDS and its Metaphors", op. cit. 114. And she
adds, "I am thinking, of course, of the United States, where people
are currently being told that heterosexual transmission is extremely
rare, and unlikely -- as Africa did not exist."
[28] The Pet Shop Boys, "It Couldn't Happen Here", ~Actually~, 1987.
[29] Bruce Springsteen, "Streets of Philadelphia," ~Philadelphia
Soundtrack~, 1993.
[30] Burroughs, _The Electronic Revolution_, op. cit.
[31] It seems quite ironic again that the controversy about the HIV
"hypothesis" should have exploded right at the time the hypervirus
pandemics passed its final inflexion point, around 1993. In 1993,
Kary Mullis, in an interview for the Sunday Times, said: "If there is
evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific documents
which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least
with a high probability. There is no such document." (28 nov. 1993).
A year later, again in ~The Sunday Times~, Dr. Bernard Forscher,
former editor of the U.S. Proceeding of the National Academy of
Sciences, was quoted saying: "The HIV hypothesis ranks with the 'bad
air' theory for malaria and the 'bacterial infection' theory of
beriberi and pellagra [caused by nutritional deficiencies]. It is a
hoax that became a scam." (3 April 1994) See
http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/controversy.htm
[32] Steven Shaviro "Two Lessons from Burroughs," in _Posthuman
Bodies_, ed. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, University of
Indiana Press, 1995, pp. 38-54, p. 38.
[33] Ibid., p. 47.
[34] Steven Shaviro, _Doom Patrol_, chap. 10, "William Burroughs"
http://www.dhalgren.com/Doom/ch10.html.
[35] Louis Pawels, "Le mon*me des zombis", ~Figaro Magazine~,
December 6, 1986.
[36] Although Derrida consciously avoided the AIDS metaphor, critics
were prompt to make the connection: "Derrida's most striking claim is
that 9-11 is the result of an autoimmune disorder. (...) 9-11 was a
double suicide of both attackers and their victims. We are suffering
from a metaphysical AIDS." Gergory Fried, "The Uses of Philosophy",
~Village Voice~, quoted in "Derrida: democracy after 9/11",
Philosophy.com, February 23, 2005, on-line at
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/002925.html.
[37] "Autoimmune conditions consist in the spontaneous suicide of the
very defensive mechanism supposed to protect the organism from
external aggression", Giovanna Borradori, _Philosophy in a Time of
Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida_, Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2003, p. 150.
[38] Ibid., p. 154.
[39] Ibid., pp. 187-188. Derrida refers here to his "Faith and
Knowledge: The Two Sources of 'Religion' at the Limits of Reason
Alone," in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., _Religion_,
Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998.
[40] Susan Sontag, "AIDS and its Metaphors," op. cit, pp. 105-108,
first emphasis in the original, second and third mine.
[41] Borradori, _Philosophy in a Time of Terror_, p. 95.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Jean Baudrillard, "L'esprit du terrorisme", ~Le Monde~, November
2, 2001, revised translation based on Rachel Bloul's translation,
available on the webpage of the European Graduate School, accessed
March 25, 2005,
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-the-spirit-
of-terrorism.html.
[44] Ibid.
[45] William Burroughs, "The Priest they called Him" from
~Exterminator!~ (1960), spoken word released on CD in 1993 with Kurt
Cobain and Nirvana.
[46] Cf. Bukatman, _Terminal Identity_, pp. 74-78, for an analysis of
this figure.
--------------------
Thierry Bardini, a sociologist, is an associate professor in the
Department of Communication at the Universite de Montreal, Canada,
where he co-directs the Workshop in Radical Empiricism (with Brian
Massumi). In 2000, he published _Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart,
Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing_, at Stanford
University Press. He is currently finishing his second manuscript,
entitled _Junkware: The Subject without Affect_.
http://www.junkware.net
_____________________________________________________________________
*
* CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology and
* culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews in
* contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as
* theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape.
*
* Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
*
* Editorial Board: Jean Baudrillard (Paris), Paul Virilio (Paris),
* Bruce Sterling (Austin), Siegfried Zielinski (Koeln), Stelarc
* (Melbourne), DJ Spooky [Paul D. Miller] (NYC), Timothy Murray
* (Ithaca/Cornell), Lynn Hershman Leeson (San Francisco), Stephen
* Pfohl (Boston), Andrew Ross (NYC), Andrew Wernick (Peterborough),
* Maurice Charland (Montreal), Gad Horowitz (Toronto), Shannon Bell
* (Toronto), R.U. Sirius (San Francisco), Richard Kadrey (San
* Francisco).
*
* In Memory: Kathy Acker
*
* Editorial Assistant: Ted Hiebert
* WWW Design & Technical Advisor: Spencer Saunders (CTHEORY.NET)
* WWW Engineer Emeritus: Carl Steadman
_____________________________________________________________________
To view CTHEORY online please visit:
http://www.ctheory.net/
To view CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA online please visit:
http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/
_____________________________________________________________________
* CTHEORY includes:
*
* 1. Electronic reviews of key books in contemporary theory.
*
* 2. Electronic articles on theory, technology and culture.
*
* 3. Event-scenes in politics, culture and the mediascape.
*
* 4. Interviews with significant theorists, artists, and writers.
*
* 5. Multimedia theme issues and projects.
*
*
* The Editors would like the thank the University of Victoria for
* financial and intellectual support of CTheory. In particular, the
* Editors would like to thank the Dean of Social Sciences, Dr. C.
* Peter Keller, the Dean of Engineering, Dr. D. Michael Miller and
* Dr. Jon Muzio, Department of Computer Science.
*
*
* (C) Copyright Information:
*
* All articles published in this journal are protected by
* copyright, which covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and
* distribute the article. No material published in this journal
* may be translated, reproduced, photographed or stored on
* microfilm, in electronic databases, video disks, etc., without
* first obtaining written permission from CTheory.
* Email [log in to unmask] for more information.
*
*
* Mailing address: CTHEORY, University of Victoria, PO Box 3050,
* Victoria, BC, Canada, V8W 3P5.
*
* Full text and microform versions are available from UMI, Ann Arbor,
* Michigan; and Canadian Periodical Index/Gale Canada, Toronto.
*
* Indexed in: International Political Science Abstracts/
* Documentation politique international; Sociological Abstract
* Inc.; Advance Bibliography of Contents: Political Science and
* Government; Canadian Periodical Index; Film and Literature Index.
*
_____________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________
ctheory mailing list
[log in to unmask]
http://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ctheory
--
This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous
content by the NorMAN MailScanner Service and is believed
to be clean.
The NorMAN MailScanner Service is operated by Information
Systems and Services, University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
====
This e-mail is intended solely for the addressee. It may contain private and
confidential information. If you are not the intended addressee, please take
no action based on it nor show a copy to anyone. Please reply to this e-mail
to highlight the error. You should also be aware that all electronic mail
from, to, or within Northumbria University may be the subject of a request
under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and related legislation, and
therefore may be required to be disclosed to third parties.
This e-mail and attachments have been scanned for viruses prior to leaving
Northumbria University. Northumbria University will not be liable for any
losses as a result of any viruses being passed on.
************************************************************************************
Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion
list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic
study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html
*************************************************************************************
|
