Editors’ Note

Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”

97% of our DNA looks like gibberish.

Page Hill Starzinger, “A Karstic”

The parasite . . . does not even have to speak; it resonates. It makes noise, like the gnawing rats. It produces toxins, inflammations, fever. . . . It intervenes in the networks, interrupting messages and parasiting the transmissions.

Michel Serres, The Parasite

Prescient nearly thirty years ago, Haraway’s observation retains its foreboding accuracy. And yet, as the genetic material of that single thought encounters and infects the quotes to follow, other cellular structures appear; the epigraph is recombinant. Transmission; vaccination; replication; infection; reproduction; immunity; vulnerability; permeability; meme, median, mode; words; ideas; code: these are just some of the ironies, pleasures, and paradoxes of our inquiry here in the Viral issue of WSQ.

The discovery of vaccines that could prompt the body to resist viral infection happened almost a century before viruses were discovered; their effect—immune responses that could prevent disease—long preceded discovery of a cause. Viruses themselves were first identified by a botanist studying disease in tobacco crops, an attempt to stop unseen forces wreaking havoc in the agricultural economy. Biological viruses are parasitic, infectious agents dependent on the bodies of the hosts in which they replicate. They maintain a highly paradoxical relationship to the entities and systems that provide for their very existence, yet which they mimic, incorporate, mutate, and potentially destroy. Viruses share a tremendous capacity for adaptation, and for disruption—unruly, noisy forces that can divert systemic flows. Rather than viewing viruses as alien others, infiltrating systems from the outside, we might consider the virus’s ability to bring to light aspects of discord inherent in the networks in which they thrive. In this sense, echoing work on the role of viruses as formative agents in evolutionary biology, the virus functions as an element of difference that is constitutive of the larger system. “The difference is part of the thing itself,” Michel Serres writes of the parasite-system complex, “and perhaps even produces the thing. . . . In the beginning was the noise.”¹

The relationship between the virus and the viral builds upon the slippages each term connotes between material effects and latent codes. Virality denotes the speed with which information moves across cyberspace at the same time that it invokes our fears of contagion, worries about the loss of information, and threats to health, borders, identities, economies, and politics. Like viruses, viral processes are vexingly unpredictable, simultaneously capable of radical intervention and regressive cooptation. Moreover, as guest editors Patricia Clough and Jasbir Puar observe in their introduction, viral denotes processes that require us to interrogate anew our assumptions about the actual and the virtual. In so doing, scholars are called upon to rethink how we understand biopolitics, security, race, sexuality, gender, technologies of communication, forms of embodiment, and aesthetics, particularly in the institutional settings of the market, the family, religion, health, the military, education, media, and the state.

The articles assembled in this volume come from a range of interdisciplinary academic spaces and many of the authors are themselves artists. Read as a group, they simultaneously trace and analyze an intellectual arc that spans the asymptotic realms of the imaginary to the actualized and from there to the unmeasurable—overlapping categories to say the least. At the risk of reductionist summarizing, several prominent themes thread across the scholarly works included here, in particular those of race, disease, and politics. The juxtaposition of approaches is remarkable for the jarring similarities they force us to recognize regarding questions of agency and control in diverse systems. What are the possibilities and limitations for radical political action within networks of informatics (Blas, Franklin)? How does the infrastructure of online social activism intersect with colonial legacies and contemporary global politics (Nyong’o)? How is mobility (of viruses, bodies, and capital) regulated in transnational contexts, and how are issues of security, disability, and vulnerability mobilized defensively (White, Chen)? How are categories of race produced, labored, and transmogrified within accelerating technological networks (Balance, Rai)? Can crowds, swarms, or alien codes evade the icy hard limits...