Antiviral: Capitalism of the fourth kind

Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral is a symptom of an unfolding, fourth order of capitalism, beyond Gilles Deleuze’s societies of control and Jean Baudrillard’s third-order simulacrum: viral capitalism. As biocapitalism’s modes of production, consumption and abstraction become increasingly contagious, biological and technological viruses conjugate. This essay draws on Thierry Bardini’s analysis of biotechnology and biopolitics, and Deleuze and Baudrillard’s schizophrenic analyses of psychoanalysis and capitalism. After examining the rationale of this fourth order, it analyses Antiviral’s contagious machines, bodies, politics, aesthetics and economics, all of which are vectors for viral transmission.