Introduction

This paper sets out a conceptual analysis of rhythm as a force of disruption and of re-organisation. By disentangling rhythm from human corporeality, habits and purposes (rhythm as a prerogative of human movement), we will propose its re-qualification as an attribute of matter itself: rhythm as a galvanising current flowing in and between all human, animal and technological, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic bodies, simultaneously dissolving their solid organisations and re-modelling their fluid exchanges. Being supported by an ontological dichotomy, most philosophical or musicological theories have perpetuated the difference between rhythm as a mechanical and broken repetition of units subject to physical laws (as in Plato’s essentialist theory of rhythm), and rhythm as an organic, uncontrolled and continuously flowing expression of the natural world (coinciding with phenomenological notions such as Henri Bergson’s ‘duration’). [1] In order to escape this philosophical impasse, the aim of this paper is to unravel the relation between the cuts and flows, the breaks and continuities, the intensive and extensive moments which constitute the ontological and physical status of rhythm.

In the specific case of sound and dance, the rhythm of a dancing body (as a bio-physical, but also cultural and social entity) results from an immanent virtual state of dis-solution (the body as a fluid multiplicity of uncontrollable, infinitesimal particles intensively stimulated and excited) and a simultaneous solid state of re-shaping and re-structuring (the body as a solid whole extensively drawing space with its own steps). Working as a virus, rhythm disrupts linear bodily movements and clear perceptions, re-organising them after its own order. This paper will analyse rhythmic infection and its cohesive/dissolving effects in three directions. The first one is bio-physical: focusing on the biological, anatomical and perceptual dimensions of sound perception and movement, we will describe the spread of rhythm across the cellular population of a body, as a catalyst of biological and anatomical processes of disruption and reorganisation. The second is cultural: mapping the insertion of this bio-physical body/organisation into particular social and geographical contexts, we will consider rhythmic diffusion across spatial confines in and between human bodies and collective groups, as a catalyst for the weaving of autonomous rituals, contacts and relations. The third is technical: after a temporal leap (from old rituals to contemporary dance events), we will investigate contemporary rhythmic engineering through various digital machines directly plugging in the molecular composition of a dancing body, trying to understand how the new digital manipulation and diffusion of rhythm becomes a locus for the capitalist, biological and social control of bodily movements, but also for unpredictable self-organised events at both bio-physical and cultural levels.

Rhythmic trans-coding

The Platonic theorisation of rhythm as a repetition of elementary units (steps or beats) provided the philosophical basis for all future definitions of rhythm as a meter of mechanical measurement, comparison and judgement, and as an instrument of behavioural codification allowing the prediction, control and regulation of bodily movement.

Distinguishing the disciplinary nature of all metric practices aiming at the control and regimentation of movement from the undisciplined character of rhythm, Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari write:

It is well known that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular meter or cadence: there is nothing less rhythmic than a military march. ‘ Meter, whether regular or not, assumes a coded form whose unit of measure may vary, but in a noncommunicating milieu, whereas rhythm is the Unequal or the Incommensurable that is always undergoing transcoding. Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical; it ties together critical moments or ties itself up in passing from one milieu to another. It does not operate in a homogeneous space-time, but by heterogeneous blocks. It changes direction. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1992: 313)

Echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of this rhythmic ‘trans-coding’ force, we can start to delineate our definition of sound and dance rhythm as the spread of a physical and cultural virus carried by sound molecules across and between different bodies and groups, and whose propagation is also able to undermine the linearity of all economic, cultural and political meters. For this purpose, it is of crucial importance to highlight the ambivalent nature of the rhythmic virus, and to grasp its double role as an agent of homogenisation and of ‘heterogenisation’. By identifying the relation between meter and rhythm as an immanent one, we can start to grasp the inextricable link between two different but simultaneous processes of rhythmic dissolution and metric re-organisation. These coexistent processes characterise the capitalist commercialisation and control of sound through the diffusion, modulation and codification of rhythm, and through its transformation into music, but are also at the basis of an autonomous net of rhythmic self-organisations and of sound/dance events.

In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, the periodic repetition of a unit realises a behavioural code, a metric reiteration which allows the disciplining of the body and its movements through identification, synchronisation and communication mechanisms. In other words, the homogeneous and specular reproduction of constant units or copies (as in the genetic, cultural or information codes) acts as an instrument for the bio-physical identification of a human body, for its regular functioning in a social environment and for its efficient control of cybernetic systems. Metric reiteration is the accurate clock which enables a body to recognise its organic and human identity (the biological code as based on genetic and cellular reproduction), to perform its ordered movements and interactions (the social code as based on rigid behavioural structures) and to adapt technology to its own aims (the digital code as based on clear information exchange). In this sense, meter would correspond to what Deleuze defines as ‘generality’, i.e. a set of immutable laws regulating the identity and resemblance of subjects and their equivalence to designated terms, while also allowing for political and economic control. (Deleuze, 2001) Isolating rhythm and limiting it to the field of human movement (intended as a linear sequence of positions and steps), Western science and philosophy have theorised a categorical difference between disciplined and undisciplined motion, reducing rhythm to a sort of motor regulator.

After the modern recuperation of Presocratic and atomistic ideas (such as Lucretius’s ‘clinamen’), rhythm becomes an imperceptible, quantic coagulation or dispersion of matter behind perceivable steps and beats. Rather than to equality and equivalence, the development of rhythm is more related to singularity and uniqueness, disruption and trans-coding. ‘Effective but lacking content, the [rhythmic] ‘transmission’ is not a [linear, interceptable] communication. It is a ‘transduction’: a self-propagating movement seeding serial self-organizations, ”. (Massumi, 2002: xxx) Linking together heterogeneous blocks (of molecules, human populations, information units), the transmission of rhythm opens every bio-physical, social or technical organisation to identity contaminations, synchronicity disruptions and communication disturbances. In this sense, we can define the disturbing spread of rhythm as a viral propagation infecting all biological, social or cybernetic bodies, engendering different material organisations where each body does not form a new world closed in on itself but, on the contrary, is constituted by coexistences and interactions of different kinds. (De Landa, 2001)

The first of these rhythmic organisations is bio-physical, coinciding with the constitution of the dancing body as a living, moving and perceiving organism. Considering rhythm as an attribute characterising the molecular, micro-physical dynamics of matter and its energetic vibrations (i.e. rhythm as a continuous qualitative emergence spreading from material, chemical reactions), the whole of matter loses its static appearance and becomes an ensemble of dancing molecules. This dancing matter becomes organised into inorganic or organic, moving and perceiving bodies through particular hierarchical and functional dispositions of elements. Sequences of molecules and cells, neuro/chemical paths and a multiplicity of particles/signals, organs, tissues and apparatuses align themselves in a particular order, building up the biological con-formation of an organism and its formal, anatomical structure, at the same time transforming it into a host of parasiting processes. The evolution of the human species happens then through a particular systematisation of organs and through particular morphological (arms, legs, head), postural (standing position) and kinetic features, gestures and movements, together with the development of a particular sensori-motor system and a perceptual/behavioural coordination.

At the same time, myriad molecular movements and relations perform their own schizo/rhythmic development, provoking a sort of micro-kin-aesthetics of imperceptible alterations and deviations. The spread of intensive qualities from the movement of these particles is immanent to the harmonic and functional equilibrium of the whole organism. In other words, while the ‘organic organisation’ of a body is based on the formation, specialisation and communication of all its parts, at a microscopic level this organisation is continuously de-coded and dis-articulated. Acting as a sort of physiological viral development, the molecular propagation of energy (sound, light) across a living/moving body can be seen as following the same rhythmic patterns as those of an epidemic diffusion. This rhythmic vector of energetic spreading cuts across the very organisation of the body: the transversal weaving of intensive amplifications along the linear sensori-motor circuit decentralises and trans-forms the integrated image and coordinated actions of the body. In the muscular/skeletal apparatus, the spread of rhythm happens as a viral energetic diffusion through the nerves, in a sort of neural micro-dynamics fractally composing movement and dance as a series of involuntary jerks, variable speed relations and gravitational lines of flight. In the dancing body, the energetic dance of electromagnetic and acoustic matter produces a series of molecular alterations and generates multiple local realisations, dispersion and excesses.

After this transformation and passage of rhythm from sound and light waves to bodily movements, we can see how the performance of movement becomes culturally organised among different social groups. In its social dimension, dance is usually identified with the movement of a collective body according to a common rhythm, as the act of keeping time together for a prolonged period, “so as to establish a regular beat”. [2] In evolutionary terms, this activity is associated with the enhancement of group homogenisation and with the dissipation of friction through imitation and synchronisation. In this sense, dance becomes a kinetic, cultural and social organisation aiming at the material preservation and cultural integrity of a collective body. Uniform kinetic habits and corporeal regulations, geographic confines and ethnic, sexual or class discriminations constitute the rigid grid which entraps and moulds the free circulation of rhythm inside and between social groups. At the same time, the kine-topology of rhythm reveals how solid and stable social structures are eroded by uncontrollable subterranean movements coinciding with a micro (or local) level of aggregation of crazy particles/people gathering or moving around particular speed attractors and drawing a schizo/rhythmic map across cities, states and continents. Rhythm’s micro-physical turbulences determine a series of intensive alterations in the social field, gathering or scattering masses of people in crowds and tribes that move beyond the impermeable segmentations imposed by cultural and socio-kinetic discipline. Disturbing the social equilibrium of all identified groups, rhythm acts as a virus whose propagation is often historically and socially linked to epidemic diffusions along episodes of ‘populational’ contacts. As a viral spreading or transversal weaving of sounds and dances across cultural codes, rhythm galvanises the social organisation of life, while decentralising and de-forming every rigid cultural morphology or behavioural regularity through the molecular movements of a collective body in continuous passage and change. On this social layer, technological apparatuses emerge (from acoustic drums to digital sampling and mixing machines), provoking acoustic or electro-acoustic amplifications and turbulences that infect the bodily sensorium and corrode the borders of regimented social relationality, while freely travelling across time and space.

Beyond every metaphorical or analogical association, the definition of rhythm as a virus infecting all physical and cultural organisations beyond temporal and spatial confines is founded on the identification of a common viral behaviour: on one hand, viruses carried by pathogenic agents, breaking the linear genetic sequence and purity of biological communication; on the other hand, sound fostering promiscuous contacts between molecules, or between different populations and cultures, through the explosion of dance as an intensive alteration and metamorphosis of the physical and social body. Symbiosis constitutes the process common to these viral dynamics. In her Serial Endosymbiosis Theory (or SET), molecular biologist Lynn Margulis illustrates how heterogeneous contacts and assemblages of molecules and compounds, cells, bodies and species proliferate through a promiscuity which is at the very basis of life:

The Darwinian logic of evolution, is substituted with a rhizomatic recombination of information expanding through viral hijacking of codes between singular machines of reproduction: a microbe and an insect, a bud and a flower, a toxin and a human. (Parisi, 2004: 16).

All ‘symbiotic’ relations between beings of different scales, species and worlds, and all webs of transversal relations continuing across linear transmission processes are carried by a viral and rhythmic spread of vibrations ‘inside and between’ heterogeneous populations. At its molecular level, sound represents an example of symbiotic contact. Travelling across bodies, seas and historical eras, screens and sensorial surfaces, flows of sound particles are carried by rhythm as an energetic wave. Entering the body-organisation as a viral energetic flow, sonic rhythm opens it to multiple side communications between different particles. Generating symbiotic contacts and contagions between bodies (such as the impact of sound vibrations on the molecular constitution of a human body), rhythm becomes a viral catalyst of bodily movement and transformation. In this sense, it is crucial to note how, in order to realise and reproduce their mechanical energy, the replicating mechanisms of sonic vibrations utilise a series of host media: from air molecules to neural cells, the infection of sonic rhythm provokes dance as its main pathology and cure. The social spread of sound and dance in periods of epidemic diffusion makes the viral character of rhythm even more evident. From this point of view, the biological, anthropological and cybernetic dimensions of rhythm can be integrated with a study of acoustic and epidemic phenomena, allowing for a fractal understanding of sound and dance in terms of molecular packs, viral spreads and pathological behaviours.

Bio-physical rhythm: Neural infections of sound and the symptomatology of dance

The discovery of the DNA code, for example, is focusing on how you can create different species of beings by starting from the very smallest particles and their components,’ Karlheinz Stockhausen has said. ‘That is why we are all part of the spirit of the atomic age. In music, we do exactly the same. (Eshun, 1993:02[013])

In his multidimensional and interdisciplinary analysis of electronic dance music, Kodwo Eshun describes the sound studio as a lab, a research centre for the breaking down of the beat as the infinitesimal sound molecule (Eshun, http://www.ccru.net/swarm3/3_abducted.htm).In the lab, the Breakbeat is isolated and replicated, becoming the DNA of rhythmic science and the matter of multiple sonic and cultural mixtures. Through the digital sampler, a sequence of sounds can be played for an infinite number of times, cut into small bits and re-ordered, accelerated or slowed down. The separation of singular elements and fragments forming the fabric of acoustic material is realised as a ‘granulation’ of sound.

When translated into sonic terms, meter becomes a ‘standard unit ‘ that divides ‘ music; the ‘ rhythm ‘ counted evenly and stressed on every main beat.’ (Davis, http://www.technosis.com/cyberconf.html) On the other hand, in the linear flowing of a ‘pulsed’ sequence, the viral behaviour of rhythm appears as a molecular web of relations between uniform metric lines, or as a swelling wave connecting different critical moments of qualitative acoustic change. As a rhythmic example, we can see (or hear) how the meter-grid of either classical music beats or electronic sound BPMs (beats per minute) is dis-organised by velocity or frequency shifts emerging as critical moments in-between the pulses and weaving their own organisation. At the same time, ‘permanent conversations or cross-patterns [emerge] between each [line], a dialogue which is also a complex dimension of difference introduced between elements that are themselves often quite repetitive and simple.’ (Davis, http://www.technosis.com/cyberconf.html) In this sense, the rhythm of a sound track is tied together as a continuous, intensive swelling or criss-crossing going on under the linear development of meter.

The viral diffusion of rhythm as an intensive, energetic sound wave across the body provokes a circulation of electrical signals via the nerves. This neural diffusion of energy/electricity is the source of a displaced and decentred movement, a multiplicity of ‘local motions’ and uncontrollable nervous jerks in the rhythmically contaminated body system. Every quantifiable, measurable and organisable succession of steps is fractally composed and de-composed by multiple micro-electroshocks leading the body across various critical points (such as sudden speed shifts or centrifugal and centripetal transitions).

The first thing to do is to acknowledge that rhythm isn’t really about notes or beats, it’s about intensities, it’s about crossing a series of thresholds across your body. ‘ When you hear a beat, a beat lands on your joints, it seizes a muscle, it gives you a tension, and suddenly you find your leg lifting despite your head. Sound moves faster than your head, sound moves faster than your body. What sound is doing is triggering impulses across your muscles. (Eshun, http://www.ccru.net/swarm3/3_abducted.htm)

According to Brian Massumi, movement is a continuous, qualitative change of the body, a passage across various intensive thresholds. A trajectory of successive displacements can only appear retrospectively, when movement stops and the occupied positions emerge, in a sort of progressive freeze-frame attempting to discipline and control the body between beginnings and endpoints but failing to bring to light its real changes. Steps and gestures, poses and positions can only be plotted by subtracting movement. Movement itself lies in the intervals, when the body in motion does not coincide with itself but is in transition, never in any point and always in passage. This transition is not decomposable into constituent parts: in Massumi’s words, it is a dynamic unity which dissolves the stasis/motion binarism into a continuous emergence of different speeds. (Massumi, 2002: 8) Conceiving a body in terms of its rhythmic, intensive passages allows us to go beyond its lived, accomplished experiences (which are related, rather, to a phenomenology of movement), and to reach the very conditions of those experiences, the continuous qualitative metamorphoses which, once realised in space as positions and steps, represent the controllable and controlled actions of a bodily identity. Borrowing Deleuze’s words, we can say that a body’s rhythm or duration is realised in the process of its dissolving, showing how this body differs not only from other things, but first and foremost from itself.

Rather than metricising a reiteration of steps, rhythm delineates the elusive character of the body, its molecular self-differentiation, its continuous dis- and re-appearing after all perceptual and spatial changes. At this level, human perception, sensori-motor coordination and cognition are indistinguishable from trance and hallucination. The penetration and invasion of sonic timbres, pitches, textures and speeds strikes and affects the kinesic equilibrium of the dancing body, while the listener/dancer is in passage between different dimensions, trying ‘to explore a complex space of beats [and] to follow any of a number of fluid, warping, and shifting lines of flight.’ [3] The hindrance of rhythm puts gestures in a continuous variation, transforming dance from the observable and controllable movement of a single body/particle, to the unpredictable and imperceptible metamorphosis of the body as a population of particles. Rather than offering the body a regular hold to be followed with an ordered sequence of movements and steps, rhythm leads the body to total dis-orientation. It con-fuses its perceptual and motor capacities, breaking the coordination of its steps and opening its movements to unpredictable and involuntary realisations. Escaping the logic of mastery and organisation, the body gets entangled and crippled, interposing itself into the series of its continuous metamorphoses, forming and de-forming itself along a line of continuous variation. [4] Through rhythm, dance dissolves the system of power and dominance which organises it as an expression and communication of physical potency and as a tool for social control.

This physical and anatomical level is then organised as a system of codified gestures and steps forming the traditional behavioural patterns of particular ethnic groups. At this level, the coherent physical organisation of the dancing body becomes the instrument for a linear, ordered sequence of gestural memes. As cultural units of information, memes are cognitive and behavioural patterns copied and replicated from one individual’s memory to another. Habits and traditions (such as the steps of a dance) become independent creatures in symbiotic relationship with human cultures, replicating themselves by using human hosts and influencing their behaviour. According to the memetic model, social and cultural evolution work along the same principles of biological evolution. The system of linear memetic and cognitive communication between generations of the same group via a mechanism of vertical transmission (limiting for example the steps of a dance to a specific ethnic tradition) is nevertheless disrupted by a horizontal spread of qualitative traits (such as rhythm) between different individuals or populations. Ancient worldwide navigation and contemporary information vectors like radio or the Internet spread these cultural/rhythmic viruses all around the globe, making them increasingly invasive and able to influence a people’s ‘meme pool’. As highlighted by Reynolds, hybridity becomes a problem only when thinking in terms of purity and unnatural mixtures, when the physical (and metaphysical) dangers of artificial grafts threaten a presumed original cleanliness with the risk of infection, contamination and bastardisation. [5]

Ritual rhythm: Old infections and the becoming-animal of dance

As a space of physical and cultural contamination, the Mediterranean Sea has always been crossed by multiple vectors and exchanges of ships, bodies, musical instruments. [6] Across this woven space, millennia of migration and colonisation have mixed not only people and cultures, habits and tales, but also sounds and bacteria, germs and animals (many of which, such as spiders, have never been domesticated) invading and conquering alien ecosystems. (De Landa, 2001: 20) One particular example of rhythmic spread across different times and places is the contagion and propagation from North-African drumming rituals to South Italy’s Tarantella dances. From Southern to Northern Mediterranean, hallucinogenic sounds and poisonous Tarantulae travelled together with different instruments of perceptual amplification (such as drums), across several miles and centuries of rhythmic transmission.

After the first contacts with the Saracens (a North-African population coming from the Maghreb desert in the 11th and 12th centuries) and up to the 1960s, a dancing ritual spreads in the whole Mediterranean, together with the belief that the bite of a particular spider (the Taranta) provokes an illness which can only be cured through music and dancing. Although the reactions to the Taranta’s poison can be very different according to the disposition and physical constitution of the poisoned person and also to the weather and the geographic area, after the tarantula’s bite the Tarantata (the person possessed by the Taranta, usually a woman) falls into a state of catatonia and disordered bodily movements, accompanied by other symptoms such as convulsions, fainting and even delirium.

If the irruption of a physical and psychological crisis can be considered as the manifestation of a disturbance in the usual flow of life, a cure is needed to re-establish the natural cosmic order and bring back the person to a healthy state. This cure is obtained through a ritual in which the sounds of the tarantella, together with the contemplation of particular colours, incite the Tarantata to evoke and exorcise the force of the spider’s poison through dance. In the magic and sonic machine of this dance rite, the image of a Spider’s Web is echoed by the position of the Tarantata as a central Black Body surrounded by sounding and rotating atoms like thin layers describing a vibrant multicoloured web. Depersonalising the subject as an element of the cosmic whole, the Taranta ritual intervenes on the irruption of subjective and personal feelings of sadness and exhaustion by assembling an animistic-sonic machine, a microcosm where the orchestra, the sick person, sounds and colours contribute to the reconfiguration of bodily and social relations and to the restoration of the shattered equilibrium. Reconfiguring the disordered agitations of the body, the intensive rhythms of the tambourines and their dialogue with violins, guitars and street-organs organise a multicoloured dance where the link between sequences of neural excitations and affects provokes a continuous passage from compact and crystallised identities to progressive states of dissolution. Like a virus, sonic vibrations are transmitted to the body and spread according to laws that establish different power relations. In this sense, the tarantella dance performs a sort of rhythmic bodily contamination, while social integration and physical recovery can only be obtained, paradoxically, through the movements of the infected and possessed body in a multifaceted ‘viral’ and ‘medicinal’ dance. Accordingly, the contagious spread of tarantella’s rhythm across both physical and social levels of the contaminated body determines a series of unnatural participations troubling and re-organising social life in an autonomous, local way.

According to Ernesto De Martino, Tarantism must be read as a cultural-religious phenomenon going beyond its medical interpretation as a ‘real’ illness (arachnidism [spider's poisoning], psychical disorder or even sun stroke).(Milano, 2002) [7] In De Martino’s analysis, the main element which contradicts the medical interpretation is the annual repetition of seasonal crisis and musical therapy: after a first bite and after its cure through music, dance and colours, the crisis and cure cycle is renewed every year, producing a regular series of bites and de-toxifications which could not be reduced to any toxic syndrome. Rather, this re-lapse and repetition appears connected to the respect of a tradition and to a seasonal repetition in which Christianity plays a fundamental role, by bending a pagan event to its religious calendar and by disciplining the emergence of the crisis through the introduction of a more precise temporal cadence. De Martino’s interpretation gives the bite, poison, crisis and cure cycle the character of mythic-ritual symbols culturally conditioned in their functioning and efficacy, explaining how possessed people totally invent (or add to a real toxic syndrome) a series of behaviours modelled by Tarantism and imitating the real symptoms of a poisonous bite. The symbolic crisis becomes autonomous from real intoxication in the course of a cultural and religious history, exploding as a culturally shaped event in particular critical moments of life such as epidemics, famine and death.

‘It has been shown, ‘, that being possessed derives from a training; that the gestures, words, or cries of the possessed are coded; that the beginning of the crisis is governed by a set of rules.’ (Gil, 1998: 136-7) In Josè Gil’s anthropological analysis of dance rites, cultural training codifies the behaviour of dancers, but it is not enough to explain the mysterious trance of the possessed body: how can a discourse act on a body and its organs in such a powerful way? How is this ‘remote control’ possible? In Gil’s words, what transforms a ritual into something more than a symbolic structure is the link between signs and forces, and the investment of energy which the body imposes on symbols. In this sense, being possessed by a spider derives from the transmission of a force (rhythm) infecting the body and provoking a pathological condition physically and socially realised and resolved through dance. The symbolic imitation of a poisoned person or of the spider’s movements dissolves then into an energetic contamination relating the dancer to the qualitative traits of a particular Taranta, i.e. to the particular colours and sounds by which she is possessed.

On the same theoretical line, Deleuze and Guattari oppose to cultural symbolism and imitation the notion of ‘becoming’ as an alliance, an energetic symbiosis between beings of totally different scales, species, worlds (from sound molecules and human cells to animal and human bodies). (Deleuze and Guattari, 1992) From this point of view, the Taranta rite appears as a ‘becoming’, a transversal communication or a contagious event. Beyond human identification and beyond cultural resemblance or imitation, the ‘becoming-spider’ of the dancing body lies in itself, in the metamorphic process cutting across all fixed positions (woman-tarantula). Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming’ highlights the modes of expansion, occupation and contagion of a body as a molecular population. Through its becoming-spider, and then its becoming-sound and colour, the fascinated and possessed self of the Tarantata reaches a molecular dimension of imperceptible sound and light molecules. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1992: 248) Following a continuous line of energetic (chromatic, acoustic) waves and vibrations, she stretches from human to animal, from animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, up to the imperceptible:

It is already going too far to postulate an order descending from the animal to the vegetable, then to molecules, to particles. Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy. Nor is there a preformed logical order to these heterogeneities. ‘ That is how ‘ sorcerers operate. Not following a logical order, but following alogical consistencies or compatibilities. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1992: 250)

Beyond essential forms and determined subjects (human-animal), the Tarantata is subject to different degrees (of heat, color, speed etc), where each degree gives her a distinct individuality and puts her into composition with other degrees and other individualities. The constituent particles of a Tarantata’s body are only distinguished by relations of movement and rest and by degrees of speed and slowness which determine its continuous becoming. In this way, the sonic and dancing assemblage of the tarantella ritual weaved a series of social relations ‘prior to’ the separation between individual members or different groupings and to the creation of a subjective identity and space. Compared to the rigid and closed borders and to the individual cubicles of the social gridlock, the kinetopology of the Taranta rituals worked as a much more wide-mesh filter, allowing uncontrollable rhythmic contaminations among people and between different territories, overcoming institutional as well as perceptual apparatuses of subjectification.

Cybernetic rhythm: contemporary becomings-digital of sound and dance

From acoustic drumming to contemporary electronic drumming, the assemblage of the 21st Century dance ritual (made of digital sonic machines and dancing bodies, sounds and colours) realises a different depersonalising and de-subjectifying becoming of the physical and social dancing body, this time through perceptual and kinetic amplifications which undergo the codifying and de-codifying effect of digitalisation. In these modern dance rituals, digital machines work at both bio-physical and cultural levels, provoking physical turbulences and speed amplifications which infect bodily sensorial systems and cross the borders of social relationality. By re-enacting the exorcisms once accomplished by the Tarantella, rave parties represent new dance rituals with their own rhythmic qualities, as particular forms of technological becoming triggered into the body by its simultaneous passage across acoustic cyberspace and across the molecularisation of new chemical substances such as Ecstasy or Speed. The main aspect of the twenty-four hour plus rave experience appears then as a state of trance in which the dancer is totally possessed by a rhythm which catalyses her energies as a way to access unknown parts of her body-mind.

With their combinations of acoustic amplifications, visuals, techno sounds and drugs, techno-parties give the sound/colour ritual assemblage a new realisation, technologically amplifying the possession and trance state of tribal dance.

This [is] music as a matter of modifying states of mind, perceptions, bodies, brains; ‘ music that remember[s] the techniques of dance and drumming, rhythm and trance, and anticipate[s] the sense that music has more to do with sound and frequency than with melody and meaning. ‘ the drug [is] the music, and the music w[as] a means to engineering and exploring its effects. (Plant, 1998: 166)

Chemically speaking, the effect of Ecstasy is an increase in the production of dopamine and serotonin, the neurotransmitters conducting electrical impulses between neurons. An excess of dopamine stimulates locomotor activity and creates a state of euphoria, while excessive serotonin intensifies sensorial perception, almost to the point of hallucination. [8] Transforming the body into a hyper-sensitised membrane responding to certain frequencies and degrees, Ecstasy amplifies the infinitesimal, affective potential of technology. In Eshun’s words, you are ‘drugged’ by the beat and beaten by the drug’, while your body is totally fascinated and possessed. Rather than escaping the body, the sound-drug experience allows the body to escape the structures and boundaries that keep it organised.

Dancers do not dream or trip but are possessed, faceless and anonymous, by rhythms and speeds, disorganised and dispersed beyond individuation, overwhelmed by connectivity. The techno-Ecstasy combination steals identity away, but it also throws its users into new connective tissues of dance, movement, rhythm, sound, ‘. It [is] the interior technology for the digital age, ‘ the molecular adjustment that allow[s] a generation to explore the new machine interface. (Plant, 1999: 168)

As in old drumming techniques, the repetitive and regular meter of contemporary techno unfolds an important relation with the irregular and intensive character of rhythm: techno rhythm swells in virtual amplification under each beat and propagates itself in the lines of flight between different sequences, or in the affective encounters between sound and chemical drugs. At a perceptual level, the combined effects of drugs and of sampling and mixing techniques elude any cognitive and decoding attempt made on the basis of a Cartesian interpretative reason, disrupting the listener’s and dancer’s subjective perceptual states (stratified visions, hearings and organised motions) into a collective web of multiple sensations. Electronic sound runs as a flow through the body: not an equilibrated, ordered and harmonic sequence but a mutating and non-hierarchical plateau of rhythms never totally measurable, fully organizable or perceivable from a unique static point. By electronically blinding, jamming, deceiving, overloading and intruding into the conscious circuits of subjectivity, these technologies trigger a resonant mechanism which complicates the linearity of subjective processes. It is no longer a matter of a listening subject tending his ear towards the linear development of musical sequences from a determinate point in space, but of a multiplicity of ‘ambient sounds’ coming from all directions, sensations crossing the whole body and dispersing it into scattered sensations. In these apparently chaotic and disordered movements, the sonic-machine system (or sound-system of organic membranes, electric sensors, electronic or computer screens, drugs) produces its own self-organisations. Contemporary electronic sound as an ‘on going event’ implies autonomous processes of destratification and deterritorialisation that disentangle it from its historical, geographical and musical identifications and from recognizable causes or origins. Its unfinished, unfixed and contingent character gives the machinic sound system the character of an independently living and changing cosmos, as the enveloping reality of a new technological ritualisation.

Beyond their apparent function of formal copy and reproduction, the amplifications performed by digital machines generate a fundamental process of bodily re-qualification and re-invention. Catalysing a series of infinite multiplications and proliferations of sounds, these machines contaminate the sacred, untouchable realm of the human body, liberating it from the essentialist idea of a pre-determined organic, cultural and technological originality. At the same time, unleashing an unlimited potential for corporeal metamorphosis and ‘mediatic parthenogenesis’, digital technology allies itself with the invasive and subliminal power of contemporary capitalism.

As Luciana Parisi argues, by spreading and modulating a proliferating flow of (genetic, cultural, cybernetic) information, digital machines trace a hazy line which reconciles the rigidity of control strategies and total incorporation with absolute speed and uncontrollable diffusion. ‘Bio-informatic’ capitalism generates an assemblage of communication modalities and a multiplication of transmission lines between different beings such as genes and human bodies, animals and computers. Without replicating whole bodies/images in order to produce an integrated ideology, technology intervenes on their microscopic variations, at the same time multiplying and re-mixing them. The molecular control-net woven by contemporary capitalism does not oppose but feeds on the proliferation of information, at the same time capturing, selecting and optimising it through a modulation of the intervals (i.e. the instants of virtual and potential states, of creative and affective tendency) between information units (genes, images, bits). [9] The aim of this capitalist modulation is to reach an absolute predictability of physical and cultural behaviours through a minute control of potentials and through multiple technical manipulations directly intervening on bodily flesh, from its embryonic stage to its more specialised dynamic functions.

As a technique for deciphering, re-ordering and re-combining the genetic material of bodies, key elements of bio-technology emerged in the late ’70s and early ’80s (for example with Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen’s experiments on the recombination of DNA molecules) as a way to map genetic sequences and make them manipulatable and reproducible ad infinitum. By replicating pieces of DNA and by combining them among each other, bio-technologies of genetic manipulation intervene in the genetic and biological rhythms of the organism, opening up a vast field of repercussions and effects that resonate at the molecular and cellular level of bodily organisation. The alteration of adrenal gland activity, enzyme levels and other hormonal functions and the consequent changes in physical and behavioural characteristics, capacities and performances (such as sensitivity, or the velocity and resistance of the body in motion) constitute an example of the transformative potential unleashed by such rhythmic manipulations. Transplants, prostheses and, more recently, telerobotics and the realisation of bodily remote-control constitute another modality of technological intervention on the anatomical and kinetic organisation of a body and on its dynamic performances. Directly tapping into the level of neural transmission and sensori-motor coordination, these technologies influence the physiological basis of human rhythm and motion, behaviour and social relationality, transferring them to a more complex dimension of electro-digital stimulation and de-centred control. Contemporary technologies of acoustic amplification then institute a further level of bio-digital modulation. By digitally generating, manipulating and reproducing sound, these technologies (from synthesisers, mixers and turntables to sonic composition software) allow us to perform infinitesimal rhythmic alterations on the soundscape and the acoustic sensosphere, redefining the perceptual experience and intensifying the sensations and motions of the human body. Simultaneously multiplying and modulating infinitesimal variables of behaviour, bio-informatic capitalism is founded on a double articulation, an immanent condition between decodification and metricisation, between the liberation and acceleration of uncoded information flows, and the continuous attempt at quantification, measure and control. On one hand, the transmission of information at both macroscopic (images and sounds, people and goods) and microscopic levels (genes and bacteria, memes, bits) happens as an epidemic spread and a simultaneous modulation of physical and cultural contagions (from diseases to pop music), delineating the viral rhythm of contemporary capitalism. On the other hand, a meter of biological and economic, social and political exchanges and equivalencies acts as a control and measurement grid on the combinatorial and transformative potential of all bodies, limiting bodily capacities and tastes and blocking their actual behaviours and movements.

According to Jacques Attali, sound/noise participates in the capitalist process as an orderable and codifiable matter. Becoming an undifferentiated and anonymous commodity, sound follows the social and economic dynamics of capitalisation, where ‘its appropriation and control is a reflection of power.’ (Attali, 1996: 6) Power (and the possibility of subversion) are generated together with music, i.e. with the writing of codes which analyse, restrain and repress the disordered sounds of bodies and tools (i.e. noise).

All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality. It is what links a power center to its subjects, and thus, more generally, it is an attribute of power in all of its forms. ‘ noise and its endowment with form. Among birds a tool for marking territorial boundaries, ‘ it indicates the limits of a territory and the way to make oneself heard within it, ‘. (Attali, 1996: 6).

By transmitting and recording noise, sound technology manipulates and channels culture, realising a significant political concern for tonalism and melody and a distrust for new languages, codes, instruments. Bio-informatic capitalism captures, modulates and sells sound through a double system of record companies and private dance clubs, cutting the rhythmic flow at both its producing and receiving ends. By regimenting sonic experimentation, production and purchase costs and pirate trading, corporate music producers create an ordered flow of music and money. On the other hand, a parasitic world of dance clubs constitutes another grid of regulation and control, capturing the sonic, chemical and social alterations provoked by the free flowing of sounds, drugs and people through systems of volume control and through identification and personal search procedures. In this way, the high-tech apparatus of clubs inserts itself into the capitalist dynamics of a regulated physical, social and economic exchange. Digital machines (amplification systems, electronic I.D. control and personal data processing) become fundamental for the capitalist control and exchange net, by allowing the control but also the modulation and combination of infinitesimal components (from low frequency sounds to dangerous chemical molecules and human bodies) and, consequently, to commercialise affective responses, movements and transformations. Oppression, as Gilles Deleuze argues, is not a violation of our eternal values but a restriction of our movements. Blocking and re-territorialising the intensive potentials of sound and dance, various strategies of control and management are promoted, trying to entrap movement (as either dance or nomadism) into predictable deterministic trajectories, trajectories of migration enclosed between starting and arriving points, and also capitalist trajectories in which music and dance become innocuous exchange products.

These strategies of physical, social and economic control are nevertheless undermined by subterranean forces which do not simply resist the capitalist biopower but re-organise its own processes:

The process of stratification points to the molecular constitution of the hierarchical organizations, the continual flow of variation that runs beneath molar aggregations. The “apparatuses of information-capture run parallel to the mesh-works or autocatalytic loops of ” reproduction ceaselessly declining from stationary states. (Parisi, 2004: 143)

A multiplicity of microscopic and virulent parasites infest their host capitalist body, a swarm of micro-physical, molecular forces constructing an alternative organisation of flows and moving at their own rhythm, producing random trajectories and virally infecting the ‘distributed nervous system of cybernetic capital.’ (Goodman, 2004) The very dynamics of capitalisation is linked to the capacity of its constituent particles (sound molecules, human bodies or information units alike) to organise themselves autonomously, and the emergence of a hierarchical capitalization does not eliminate the micro-organisations at the basis of its macro-order of exchange. Sound and dance are an example of this alternative, autonomous organisation. At a microscopic, bio-physical level, sonic and bodily rhythm-analysis shows the diffusion of rhythm beyond grids and meters and in ‘new, non-Newtonian terms that are incompatible with a trajectory description and instead require a statistical, probabilistic description’: at every step the probability is ½ that the particle will go to the left and ½ that it will go to the right. At every step, the future is uncertain.’ (Prigogine, 1997:42-43) [10]

At the same time, the rhythmic relation between technology, techno and dance and the continuous movements of the ravers-travellers across nations transforms the party scene into a social nomadic practice or a combination of extensive and intensive random voyages. The old public/private confusion and ritual convergence is re-embodied through the contemporary overcoming of the private dimension and the emergence of moving assemblages or sound-system tribes with their unfaithful followers travelling and dancing while spreading the rhythmic contagion all around the world. Beyond styles and divisions, rave parties unite generations, classes and races, all inextricably bound by sound, drug and technology. Putting to an end four hundred years of bourgeois individualism in music, techno-parties also cause an economic stir in the music industry. Famous DJs condemn them as a virus, a contagious illness, a bubonic plague of the record industry which cannot find in raves those charismatic leaders or guitar heroes, those recognisable faces and motives indispensable for the sale of its products. Rather, the de-individualising experience of electrified techno multiplies the number of possessed and infected bodies wandering in the autonomous, collective and independent microcosm of the rave, as a prolonged pause and a temporary upsetting of social and economic rules.

Conclusion

Around the idea of sound and noise as ‘unformed matter’ musically codified in the cultural and economic organisation of society, this article has woven a theoretical net of biological/philosophical relations. Considering the record industry and dance clubs as the main corporate institutions using high-tech apparatuses for the physical and social disciplining of sound and dance and for their transformation into exchange commodities, rhythm appears as a double conceptual axis of simultaneous regimentation and subversion. On one hand, the definition of rhythm as sonic and behavioural meter is revealed as the philosophical tool for the discipline and commercialisation of sound and dance. On the other hand, identifying rhythm with a viral spread allows us to grasp its contaminating character, illustrating how both capitalist organisation and subversive re-organisations capture and modulate a proliferation of rhythmic viruses by respectively blocking or feeding them.

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari’s differentiation between meter and rhythm, this viral analysis of rhythm illuminates its functioning in the organisation of linear communication systems, but also its viral action of disruption and interruption in contemporary capitalism: rhythm as a physical, cultural and economic virus. This epidemiological behaviour of rhythm cannot be interpreted through any simple metaphorical reading of formal analogies and similarities; rather, it emerges from an interdisciplinary connection between philosophical and biological research. Bringing to light the common behaviour of biological and sonic viruses, the relation between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical notion of rhythm and Lynn Margulis’ scientific theory of symbiosis explains the viral contamination of sound and dance as a symbiotic merging between particles, molecules, people and cultures along a continuous line of transmission and modulation working at different levels.

At a physical level, the viral propagation of rhythm works through an energetic diffusion across the body’s neural system. This electrification/infection of neural cells by sound provokes a series of continuous qualitative passages and metamorphoses of the body along its measurable and quantifiable movements. Involuntary jerks and speed variations constitute then the symptomatic picture of a rhythmically incited, pathological behaviour as the sub-stratum of synchronised and organised dance as a kinetic power system, delineating dance as a bodily becoming along the affects of different intensive (chromatic and acoustic) traits. The cultural organisation of dance as a system of precise postures and traits, gestures and steps (or kinetic habits) characterising an ethnic group happens then through the codification of particular behavioural patterns, where every ordered sequence of steps is simultaneously composed and microscopically dis-organised by a multiplicity of micro-gestures incited by rhythmic contamination.

Travelling across continents, seas and millennia, the speeds and kinetic traits of different dances carry the viral diffusion of rhythm between different communities, where the social organisation of local and national life is disrupted by the explosion and travelling of rhythmic viruses and by the ab-normal behaviour of dancing bodies. Crossed by simultaneous waves of sound, ships and pieces of technical equipment such as drums or computers, the Mediterranean Sea becomes the host of political and commercial routes, but also of subterranean rhythmic transmission. The rhythmic passage from African drumming and dancing rituals to the North Mediterranean Tarantella dance, up to contemporary rave parties, represents one of the vectors of this epidemiological rhythmicity, carrying across the waves a microphysical environment of bodies, tales, beliefs, animals, chemical substances and musical instruments flowing across time and space and transversally crossing the capitalist grid.

Rather than simply identifying the viral diffusion of rhythm with a liberating and revolutionary movement opposed to the ordered, metric structures of capitalism, this paper has tried to highlight how, depending on the concrete conditions of its realisation, the viral behaviour of rhythm is simultaneously organised by practices of potential modulation and total control, censorship and commercialisation, or by a different, alternative ecology of biological and cultural transmission through the forces of sound and dance.

Author’s Biography

Stamatia Portanova is a PhD candidate at the East London University. Her article “Tessiture digitali” (“Digital Textures”) has been published in Donne e multiculturalismo (Women and Multiculturalism), Naples, Liguori, 2004. The subject of Stamatia’s research is the relation between rhythm, dance and technology in all its forms, from tribal rituals and rave parties to contemporary cyberdance performances and video dance.

Notes

[1] In its pre-socratic etymology, ‘rhythm’ is the emergence of a shape out of a flow, or the improvised, momentary and modifiable pattern realised by every living organism. Restoring order and rigidity in this too fluid etymology, Plato’s philosophical theory intervenes to restrict the rhythmic quality to the performance of human movement and, in particular, to those continuous activities (like walking or working) which can be divided into elementary units (or steps) and rigidly ordered according to the regular meter of an alternate timing, as in a military march. For a historical and philosophical analysis of the notion of rhythm (from the pre-socratics and Plato to contemporary philosophy), see Paul Fraisse, Psicologia del ritmo (Milano. Armando, 1996).

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[2] According to William Mc Neill, in-between animal and human species, certain animals like chimpanzees have acquired the same patterns of behaviour (bipedal posture, foot stamping, arms and face gestures) which are typical of human dance. See Mc Neill, Keeping together in Time. Dance and Drill in Human Evolution (Cambridge and Massachusetts, Harvard U.P., 1995).

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[3] This is an additive ‘polyrhythm’ or ‘interdimensional play of milieus – a mutating array of splices folds and fusions, an acoustic hyperspace. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, ‘One milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1992: 313)

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[4] For an analysis of bodily performance as continuous bodily variation, see Carmelo Bene and Gilles Deleuze, Sovrapposizioni (Macerata, Quodlibet, 2002).

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[5] See Simon Reynolds, ‘Pure Fusion. Multiculture versus Monoculture’, in http://members.aol.com/blissout/purefusion.htm

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[6] The image of a criss-crossed Mediterranean derives from Paul Gilroy’s notion of the ‘Black Atlantic’, as one of its cultural and geographic ramifications. To denote the ‘webbed network’ of the African diasporic culture that penetrates the United States, the Caribbean and, by the end of the twentieth century, the UK, Gilroy considers the Black Atlantic as a modernist countercultural space, a space that, for all the claims of black cultural nationalists, is not organised by African roots but by a ‘rhizomorphic, routed’ set of vectors and exchanges: ships, migrations, creoles, phonographs, European miscegenations, expatriot flights, dreams of repatriation. The image of the criss-crossed Atlantic ocean is essential for Gilroy’s purpose, which is to erode the monolithic notion of roots and tradition by emphasising the ‘restless, recombinant’ qualities of Afrodiasporic culture as it simultaneously explores, exploits, and resists the spaces of modernity. For an interpretation of Gilroy’s notion of the ‘Black Atlantic’, see Davis, ‘Roots and Wires’.

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[7] For a symbolic interpretation of Tarantism in Southern Italy, see De Martino, La terra del rimorso. Il Sud tra religione e magia (Milano, Il Saggiatore, 2002).

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[8] ‘All music sounds better on E – crisper and more distinct, but also engulfing in its immediacy. House and techno sound especially fabulous. The music’s emphasis on texture and timbre enhances the drug’s mildly synaesthetic effects, so that sounds seem to caress the listener’s skin. You feel like you’re dancing inside the music; sound becomes a fluid medium in which you’re immersed.’ Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash (London, Picador, 1998), XXVI [19] On the copy/simulation difference, see Brian Massumi, ‘Realer than the Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari’, http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/works/realer.htm

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[9] See Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-Technology and the Mutations of Desire (London, Continuum, 2004), 129.

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[10] At this level, resonances are not local (i.e. occurring at a given spatial point or instant and with a predictable trajectory) but diffusive. See Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty. Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature (New York, The Free Press, 1997), 42-43.

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References

Attali, Jacques, Noise. The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

Bene, Carmelo and Deleuze, Gilles. Sovrapposizioni (Macerata, Quodlibet, 2002).

Davis, Erik. ‘Roots and Wires. Polyrhythmic Cyberspace and the Black Electronic’, in http://www.techgnosis.com/cyberconf.html

De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History (New York, Zone Books, 2001).

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition (London, Athlone, 2001).

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Fèlix. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London, Continuum, 1992).

De Martino, Ernesto. La terra del rimorso. Il Sud tra religione e magia (Milano, Il Saggiatore, 2002).

Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant than the Sun. Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London, Quartet Books, 1999).

____.‘Abducted by Audio’, in http://www.ccru.net/swarm3/3_abducted.htm

Fraisse, Paul. Psicologia del ritmo (Milano. Armando, 1996).

Gil, Josè. Metamorphoses of the Body (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Goodman, Steve.‘Speed Tribes: Netwar, Affective Hacking and the Audio-Social’ in F. Liebl (ed), Cultural Hacking, 2004.

Macrì, Teresa. Il corpo postorganico (Milano, Costa & Nolan, 1996).

Massumi, Brian. ‘Realer than the Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari’, http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/works/realer.htm

____. A Shock to Thought. Expression after Deleuze and Guattari (London, Routledge, 2002).

____. Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation (London, Duke U.P., 2002),

Mc Neill, William.Keeping together in Time. Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge and Massachusetts, Harvard U.P., 1995).

Parisi, Luciana. Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-Technology and the Mutations of Desire (London, Continuum, 2004).

Plant, Sadie. Writing on Drugs (London, Faber and Faber, 1998).

Prigogine, Ilya. The End of Certainty. Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature (New York, The Free Press, 1997).

Reynolds, Simon. ‘Pure Fusion. Multiculture versus Monoculture’, in Energy Flash (London, Picador, 1998), http://members.aol.com/blissout/purefusion.htm

‘What is a Margin ?’ I asked a friend recently. You know what a margin is” she replied “It’s outside the body of the text. It’s what holds the page together. Also,” she added, “It’s where you write your notes.’ (Berland, 1997)

Introduction

In a recent article, Sampson suggested that the metaphoric relocation of the contagious properties of biological viruses into viral technologies has produced the assumption that computer viruses are ‘imbued with an alien otherness’ (Sampson, 2004). However, it is arguable that such alterity can be ascribed to all viruses, as long as they are analysed as cultural notions or as discursive forms instead of being forced within clearly defined disciplinary boundaries, and being classified as separate and incompatible entities, organisms, or mere strings of code. Suspended between life and death, myth and reality, abstract and concrete, viruses are perfect candidate for the champions of marginality.

The margin is blurred, fuzzy, and flexible, it is unnoticed or ignored, it is irrelevant, it is other and abnormal. Nevertheless, it is an unavoidable presence. The margin often shows highly creative potentials, thanks to the rather blurry nature of its borders and the unpredictability of the entities that continuously move, modify and cross its peripheral space. Viruses, as discursive forms whose implicit creative potentials move from and through the margins, play a particular and privileged role in this discourse. In fact, it is when viruses are culturally defined, observed in relation to the surrounding context and submitted to a cross-disciplinary inquiry, that their complexity and subtlety become apparent.

The virus not only constitutes one of the most ancient discursive forms, but also one of the most widely spread cultural notions. Although its definition, classification and specifications change according to the discipline that examines it, the use of the term “virus” is always associated with a series of shareable perceptions, and carries a number of attributes and characteristics that can be found almost unchanged in many contexts. In historical accounts, medical treatises and chronicles, viruses and other infectious diseases are often described in similar, if not identical, ways. In these accounts, the molecular nature of the disease is not relevant. Although different agents could be the cause of an epidemic (such as bacteria, viruses or other micro-organisms), the descriptive patterns used to illustrate their physical and psychological effects over the population, as well as their diffusion, seem to coincide. Similar apocalyptic connotations and constant use of warfare metaphors are used to describe the spread of infectious diseases of various nature that affected either human beings or animals (as in Virgil’s book III of “Georgics,” which chronicles a devastating cattle epidemic) (Slack, 1992: 27; Longrigg, 1992: 45).

The very descriptive patterns produced and employed in the past persist today, be they used in popular culture, where the contagion could be the ultimate terrorist strategy, in science fiction, where the spread is often caused by pathogens escaped from secret government labs, or scientific and medical accounts, where metaphors of “the body at war” are pervasive (Martin, 1999: 366).

By sneaking inside our operating systems on a daily basis, computer viruses are the latest addition to the list of contagious threats. First, despite the visible discrepancies existing between them and their biological “relatives”, computer viruses promise to spread through our intricately linked networks in a way that could be easily compared to that of human epidemics: file sharing and density of communications across networks cause computer viruses to spread. The busier is the network, the faster is the contagion. Second, although computer viruses have no physical consequences over carbon-based life, ‘a sense of invasion and discomfort’ usually unite computer users who receive an unexpected visit by such unwanted guests (Ducklin, 2002: 1). Third, metaphors, descriptive patterns and connotations employed to describe computer viruses’ spread and effects appear to be the same used to describe biological viruses.

The above observations about the use of the term “virus” seem to suggest the existence of two paths. First, the term “virus” works within a specific field or discipline, to indicate and classify a range of distinct micro-organisms, or, in the case of computer science, a number of self-replicating programs. Second, “virus” acts as a much more generic notion that includes and expands well beyond the constraints imposed by the discipline of study. It is the very generic value carried by the term virus, and not its specific meaning as a field-related specific word that constitutes its cultural significance and discursive functioning.

Upon examining the virus as a culturally embedded notion, two elements in particular appear to emerge: first, whether analysed semantically, structurally or physically, the virus seems to have quite a dynamic phenomenology. It is incurably and uncommonly flexible and complex. Second, as mentioned above, in spite of the continuous morphing and reshaping of its meaning and significance, the virus maintains a number of discursive regularities that not only constitute its dominant accompanying attributes, but that also characterize it in a totalising way by establishing its negativity as an immanent and absolute element. In other words, whatever the historical period, or the disciplinary perspective (biology or computer science, popular culture or the arts) the virus is pervaded by a recurring rhetoric of discourse that characterizes it as prevalently negative. This rhetoric of discourse constitutes the virus’ “negative aura.” [1]

Drawing from a series of considerations about the above two characteristics in both biological and computer viruses, I am led in this paper to the analysis of a marginal use of computer viruses by a marginal portion of creative individuals. However, the particular way computer viruses are exploited in such contexts, and the consistent relation existing between them and their biological ancestors reveal both the longevity of the discourse about disease, infection and fear as well as its tactical appropriation and overturning.

Fugitive definitions

Examined from a diachronic perspective, the notion of virus has undergone multiple mutations. As observed above, before the analysis of microbes and particles was possible, the term virus was rarely used. Chronicles, historical treatises, fictional accounts and pseudoscientific studies tend to assimilate what we define today as virus with a wide variety of diseases. Whether known as the Plague, the Black Death or Smallpox, the names assigned to epidemics of various natures normally designated the effects of a disease rather than the cause, the consequences that the virus had over the individual or a population, rather than the microbes responsible for provoking the outbreak. The notion then underwent several mutations due to the development of new theories that narrowed the semantic area of virus to a scientific or technical term. However, the initial assumptions and perceptions are far from having been forgotten or replaced by more specific notions: they tend to overlap and coexist with newly acquired meanings. To give an example, the tendency to conflate cause and effect still survives: the acronym AIDS is often used to designate both the disease and the HIV virus that causes it; the common cold, although provoked by a wide variety of virus-behaving microbes cultivated and circulating in the surrounding environment, is commonly referred to as virus, where “cold” and “virus” are basically interchangeable terms (Lederberg, 2001:3).

If observed from a synchronic perspective, the use of the term virus has crossed many disciplines and has become a flexible and dynamic signifier that now indicates a specific microbe’s behaviour in science and medicine, now a technical nuisance that spreads through computers’ operating systems. Today, the term virus is a generic definition that refers to a whole variety of micro-organisms with a specific mechanism of reproduction and a peculiar set of characteristics such as its capacity to transform by exploiting the hosts’ resources and its necessity to spread through networks or human frequent contacts (Boase, 2001:67). For instance, the average computer user is often unable to distinguish between a Worm, a Trojan Horse (or logic bomb), or a Bug. For the user, they are all computer viruses.

Generally speaking, strikingly similar characteristics and comparable behaviours could be observed in phenomena originating from different contexts. The term virus has colonized those very phenomena that literally, or metaphorically manifest comparable behaviours and mechanisms of reproduction or that principally share with biological viruses similar or analogous structural composition (Wassenar, 2002: 335). For example, particular forms of marketing characterized by a word-of-mouth mechanism of diffusion have recently been labelled as “viral marketing” (Boase, 2001). Self-replicating programs have been only recently added to the list of available viruses that affect, this time, not our life as creatures made of blood and flesh, but our networks. It is not by chance that the application of the actual definition coincided with the increasing use of information networks and the realization of the potential damage they could generate. Since then, self-replicating programs have been re-baptised as the artificial intelligence version of their biological ancestors (Burger, 1989:10; Cohen, 1995:14)

The virus is one of the few discursive forms whose notion – by maintaining its description and definition almost unchanged – easily traverses the real or physically connoted world and the so-called digital domain. As mentioned above, computer viruses and biological viruses have analogous methods of diffusion through promiscuous human contacts and busy network communication flows.

In addition, it seems that the virus affects simultaneously, yet separately, nature and human beings, partially blurring the boundaries between carbon-based and digitally designed life forms, life and death, natural and artificial life. Simultaneously, but not identically. In fact, whether we refer to computer or biological viruses, the reaction or the response that different hosts give after having received one, are never identical. Reaction and response change in the human body as much as in computers. Responses by the human immune system change according to personal levels of stress and physical conditions, the surrounding environment, the mode of transmission (Lederberg, 2001:7). Standard medications don’t always produce effective reactions.

In the case of computer viruses, a similar conclusion can be drawn. Forrest suggests that we shape computer security systems using the immune system model. This model prompts the OS to scan all external code, to keep the code recognized as “self” or familiar and to discard everything that might be identified as “non-self,” that is abnormal or unusual. Forrest recognizes the complexity of computer viruses and the difficulty to constrict them within the same category. She observes that this structure does not strengthen computer systems and does not increase anti-viruses effectiveness. In fact, user habits, installation of new software and editing identify computers as unique environments that may not respond to foreign code identified as intrusive in an identically negative way. Therefore, viruses and security systems shouldn’t be reduced to de-personalized and standardized identical unities: ‘the concept of “self” likely needs to be presented in multiple ways to provide comprehensive protection’ (Forrest, 1997: 90).

“Scary” networks…

It is no easy task to eradicate a tradition that has constantly perceived viruses as pure and absolutely negative entities. Because semantic additions tend to pay more attention to the virus’ mechanism of reproduction instead of its static structure, a series of different microbes can now be potentially included and classified under the category of virus. This inclusive move admits that not only harmful microbes, but also similarly behaving particles necessary for organisms to work properly could potentially be listed under the general definition of virus. However, defining the above particles as viruses may be difficult to achieve. On the one hand, it would mean separating the notion from its most popular, deadly and fearful attributes. Viruses have been associated with human tragedy and suffering to such an extent that it is no longer possible to separate the word from any moral or subjective judgment. On the other hand, labelling non-dangerous particles as “viruses” would contradict Western biomedicine’s claim that the human body is a self-contained and independent unit, or, to use a war metaphor, a citadel or a nation-state, whose fixed boundaries, or borders, not only are rigidly separated from external agents, but they are also constantly threatened by potential foreign others, or armed enemies, identified with viruses, bacteria and microbes (Martin, 1990:365). There are no such things as “useful viruses.”

This means that the transformation of the meaning of virus has not been accompanied by an equal change in the way it is popularly perceived. The notion still contains all the assumptions and attributes deriving from earlier interpretations. In other words, the conceptual transformation (from the disease to its cause to the behaviour of a microbe or a computer program) that the notion of virus has historically undergone is mainly a selective one. A number of discursive regularities have remained embedded within the original definition, while different applications were constantly acquiring new meanings. These regularities not only constitute dominant attributes that accompany the virus, but they also characterize it in a totalising way by maintaining its negativity as an immanent and absolute element (Foucault, 1989:159).

It is convenient then for both advocates and detractors to think of the virus as a substantially harmful organism: Media, political, artistic and medical excitement tends either to defend or to attack the virus by setting its negativity as the starting or central point around which is based the entire argument. The virus continues to be seen as “other,” while any creative and innovative potential, instead of liberating the virus from its alterity, becomes part of a ‘mythology of alterity, which simply opposes to reason a form of non reason (Rella, 1994, 1978: 22).’ Representing the virus as subversive becomes part of an idealistic illusion that results in validating the old, popular syllogism ‘that which is revolutionary is persecuted and repressed: therefore, that which is persecuted and repressed is revolutionary.’(Rella, 1994, 1978: 34)

Nevertheless, eliminating what makes the virus a controversial discursive form, ignoring its status and traditional roles, would belittle the interest and curiosity of many scientists, scholars and artists. The negativity of the virus holds the pages of the general discourse together; at the same time it annihilates any attempt to dismantle such discourse.

Contradictory terms

The two characteristics summarized so far seem to constitute the originality of the virus. However, such originality manifests itself in quite an ambiguous way. On the one hand, the assigned or imposed attributes of the virus always appear to prevail over its natural dynamic manifestation and flexibility. It is always its significance as a threat or as a dangerous entity that occupies people’s first impressions, meaning that the virus responds to some given expectations. On the other hand, a distinct complexity potentially enables the virus to escape any stable definition, any static constraining, and turns it into a rather fuzzy entity. To use the initial metaphor of the book, although moving ‘outside of the body of the text,’ the virus participates, influences and ‘holds its pages together.’ Although being an outsider, an unwelcome presence within a normative situation (the so-called “healthy body” or the uninfected computer, the body of the text), the virus unifies people in their negative perceptions, moving through apparently incompatible realms, a physical and a perceptive one. The virus seems to be able to “float” in an in-between space, therefore creating new inclusive narratives. As a result of this disposition, the virus could easily coexist across spaces as diverse as the virtual and the real, the biological and the digital.

Trying to dismantle the century-old demonisation of the virus by focusing on its complexity has been on the agenda of a number of scholars and researchers. Research that studied the burden of mutual adaptation between virus and host has proved quite unpopular, as witnessed by the number of grants withdrawn because the research has been deemed marginal or risky (Epstein, 2001:416; Lederberg, 2000:290). Viruses are normally defined as types of microbes able exclusively to produce harm or annoyance to the human (and now to computer) immune system or as extraneous entities that generate negative reactions and malfunctions in the organism affected. Whether one refers to the human immune system or to the computer security system, prevention and removal are always identified as the two possible solutions to correct such malfunctions. When the existent immune systems are unable to eliminate the intruder, medications and treatments or anti-virus software and firewalls are often deemed necessary to help fulfill such a task. Once the virus is destroyed, the disease is believed to be no longer present in the immune system and the “normal” functions of the body are finally re-established (Epstein, 2001: 418).

Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg points the finger at medicine’s ‘obsessive focus on extirpating the virus’ as well as at its tendency to separate microbes from their external environment and to observe them in a condition of ‘hypervirulence.’ This notion has led to both medicine and computer science employing analogous aggressive strategies against viruses, principally aiming at their discarding and suppression. Lederberg disagrees with these strategies. Despite their general acceptance, he notes that such methods have not always led to satisfactory results: ‘In the case of new endemic diseases such as AIDS traditional practices have often proved unsuccessful ’ and therefore, they should not be left unquestioned (Lederberg, 2000: 288). This lack of success could be ascribed to the very exclusive, univocal and unidirectional notion of the virus. Although viruses ‘have a knack for making us ill’ Lederberg suggests that we ‘Drop the Manichean view of microbes –we good, they evil—In the long run microbes have a shared interest in their hosts’ survival: a dead host is a dead end for most invaders too’ (290).

Lederberg’s above statement illustrates the impossibility of separating human beings from external agents and viruses, as humans and their others are substantially co-dependent. Suppressing the latter means condemning human species on the Earth. In addition, his assertion underscores the constructiveness of the current medical and immunological practices. Perceiving viruses as the enemy forces us to treat them using the most aggressive techniques.

In computer science, more examples report similar conclusions. Ray and Ludwig directed their research towards demonstrating that computer viruses could be conceived as electronic organisms subjected to the laws of evolution. As such, they cannot and shouldn’t be eradicated from the “wired jungle” (Ludwig, 1995: 215) as they constitute essential elements of “network-wide biodiversity’ (Ray, 1999).

Validating the possibility that viruses are complex organisms embedded in a particular environment integrated with their surrounding contexts would partially dismantle the traditional belief that understands them as absolutely antithetical to other living forms and would make room for research previously classified as marginal. Moreover, examining biological and computer viruses in conjunction with the surrounding environment and the organisms they affect means refusing to agree with a notion of normality as a rigid and arbitrary given (Canguilhem, 1994: 360). This opens up a new, dynamic and moderated understanding of viruses and, consequently, fosters new multidisciplinary and multi-angled research.

A change of perspective?

The contradictions generated by contrasting and incompatible attributes can be detected even more clearly within the arts. In their contribution to the discussion about viruses, a number of artists, especially those operating in the more general field of the electronic and interactive arts, have concentrated their practices on finding, exploiting and defending the creative potentials of computer viruses.

In the artistic practices encountered, the peculiar complexity of the virus seems to be relegated to the background. Needless to say, the negative connotations of the virus are always the first elements brought to the attention of the audience, whatever the artistic intervention, and even when there is no intention in doing so. Normally, the beholder is somehow compelled to connect viral elements inserted in the artwork with her cultural, collective and personal experience of the virus: this experiential apparatus automatically pushes to the background any sign of complexity that the virus might manifest as if it were a secondary or irrelevant element.

The artist or the creator, then, does not appear to be particularly disappointed to see how the notoriously negative characteristics of the virus are most often responsible for the popularity of the artwork.

Since the first wide-scale plagues caused by the first generation of hackers and the spread of the 1988 Robert Morris’ ‘spectacularly malfunctional worm’ (Denning, 1990) computer viruses have been adopted by young hackers as their favourite and most used tool. According to Thomas such choice is the expression of a “boy culture:” young virus writers want to be noticed, to establish a unique reputation among their peers and to easily embody the “noise” in the system that they had often fantasized about (Thomas, 2002:13). Thus, it is no surprise to know that a number of hackers normally interpret computer viruses not as a nuisance, not as a threat or as an offence but, as Hellraiser comfortably affirms, as ‘an electronic form of graffiti.’ Hellraiser’s very career path went from graffiti writing to virus writing. The same can be said about many other North American hackers who established their underground viral activities in the nineties. Dibbell demonstrates how these two activities are in principle compatible, as they are both the expression of similarly conceived subcultures, whose activity consists in constantly subverting, challenging and disturbing that mainstream culture from which the members of these groups normally feel excluded. Virus writing ‘asks us to recognize that viruses, like graffiti, are just as much signal as noise; by definition, they are information that subverts control’ (Dibbell, 1995). Therefore, such activity appears very desirable for a category of young creative minds willing to scream their presence by challenging the established order, before expressing their very creativity.

The above example illustrates how viruses have been adopted by a particular category of marginal users mainly because of their negative reputation and their assumed characteristics, the possible malicious intentions as the cause of their spread and the association between their use and graffiti writing. Were computer viruses not identified in this way, young hackers would have probably turned to other more appealing forms of expression and practices. Young hackers have contributed to enhancing, instead of eliminating or modifying, an already affirmed myth of the virus as “other.”

The collective imaginary surrounding viruses and their producers, enhanced by a rich literature that portrays hackers on a par with heroes and saints, has fostered the production of a series of mythologies that depict both viruses and hackers as icons of digital culture. Consequently, a number of artists constructed their artworks by exploiting not only the technical and structural features of viruses as their model, but also the vast number of stereotypes used before them by the hackers.

Often, the viral component contained in many artistic practices acquires a political value. This element can be observed in those artworks where the very same connotations assigned to the virus are transferred to the artefact and appropriated by the artist or the creative collective, who achieve this goal by describing their work with the same vocabulary used to describe viruses and by conceiving their artworks as “other” in the same way as one would perceive the virus. Whether the goal is to dismantle or to confirm viruses’ bad reputation, to include them as starting points of a wider metaphorical content or to exploit them literally, focusing on their alterity and absolute negativity has become a quite effective means to attract quick and easy attention from the audience. A number of questions immediately arise: is artistic use and exploitation of viruses truly succeeding in investing them with a new positive value? Is – as the artists themselves claim – the exploitation of the perceived and established attributes of the virus helping to emancipate it from its “negative aura” or will it rather perpetuate and reinforce it? Does, then, the complexity and flexibility mentioned above get completely lost or hidden in the artefacts produced?

Apparently, the immediately noticeable negative connotations of the virus are always prevailing over other possible characteristics. However, it is its complexity that ultimately realizes the connection, the intertwining and interdependence between the virus itself and the elements or the space with which it is associated or by which it is surrounded. Despite appearances, the virus’ complex nature is inherent and it is never eliminated. On the one hand, an observer trapped in and influenced by her cultural and historical assumptions holds it back and fails to perceive such complexity as a strong element. In addition, and for the same reason, an equally powerless creator is faced with the impossibility of preventing such an outcome. On the other hand, the temptation to accept the otherness of the virus as a subversive and, therefore, an irresistible sexy component immediately reinforces the virus’ negativity and conceals any other possible characteristics.

An Epidemic and 0100101110101101.ORG joint project, Biennale.py , the first virus ever being exhibited inside an art institution, represents one of the first cases of incorporation, appropriation and clever exploitation of the entire apparatus of stereotypes produced by viruses. Hosted by the Slovenian Pavilion during the 49th Venice Biennale, the project has promptly helped the art collective to gain abundant media attention (Epidemic, 2001).

A printed copy of the virus code was hanging on the wall of the Pavilion, while several other copies were printed on t-shirts and worn by the audience outside and around the gallery. Simultaneously, the “real” virus was released online. Despite the existence of these three versions, it was the first visual display of the code that attracted immediate attention and gathered a curious audience during the day of the opening. The virus’ code was displayed in a conveniently pleasant way, transforming a normally invisible and unnoticed entity not only into an immediately noticeable and somehow concrete object, but also into one with an aesthetic value. In addition, the virus was strategically written in Python, a language that ‘looks more artistic’, (Deseriis 2001; my translation) because it allows the code to be constructed as a coherent narrative (in this case the text narrates the progression of a party, where the moment of infection is identified with a key action during the party represented by the verb “fornicate”).

On more than one occasion, Epidemic spokespersons declared that ‘ Biennale.py is an aesthetic experiment to demonstrate our capacity to create beauty by using programming code’. Exposing a computer virus is a ‘tribute to more than fifty years of creative code work performed by programmers but mostly not recognized as such and often gone unnoticed’ (Deseriis 2001, my translation). This idea is one of the main postulates upon which Epidemic’s interventions are based.

On another occasion, Luca Lampo cited the text of the notorious worm “I Love You,” and compared the ‘great drama contained in the code sequence’ to a few lines of Dante Alighieri’s first book of the Comedy (Epidemic, 2000). This new aesthetics allowed by viruses was made the subject of a poetry reading/performance at the Digital-is-not-Analog Festival. On the one hand, treating the virus code as an aesthetic object appears to be a mere provocation. On the other hand, reading or displaying its code turns it immediately into a more mundane entity. Thus, the virus acquires a more innocuous and familiar value. Reading the code reduces the distance existing between men and machines. A juxtaposed and artificial visual interface (windows, for instance) usually facilitates and creates a barrier between the user and the computer. The average user is unable to decipher or understand what lies behind the interface, while the code is increasingly enveloped in a halo of secrecy. The virus code, in this context, seems to re-establish, for a few moments or the length of the exhibition or the performance, a lost contact between the user and the code in a reassuring way, as it is now extracted from its usual context and domesticated as a series of words and numbers.

In the above interventions, whether the virus is interpreted as an element with an intrinsic aesthetics or an instrument that attracts attention on either the art group or the labour of the programmer, it is clear that a denial and a rejection of its negativity is somehow implicit. Epidemic/01.org are fully aware that such denial won’t suffice to mitigate the virus’ reputation, but will definitely succeed in popularising the artwork and its creators and to invest both art collective and artwork with a subversive edge.

The strategies of display used in Biennale.py confirm the immediately visible alterity of the virus. However, the project, as a whole, is certainly more than just a playful and ironic intervention. As mentioned above, the virus was also released online and a number of copies were printed on T-shirts. One could argue that the multiple displays are part of a clever marketing tactic and could note that once the virus is abstracted from its “natural” environment and it is transformed into an artwork, it immediately loses its pristine characteristics and functions becoming an empty commodified object. However, it is in this particularly ambiguous situation that the complex nature and dynamics of the virus clearly manifests itself.

Interestingly, Biennale.py is interpreted by Symantec and Norton as a virus when it spreads through the Web, while it becomes a work of art when it enters the gallery space, as if its threatening components were neutralised and its disruptive and transformative power ceased to exist. Despite the virus’ capacity to cross both spatial and disciplinary boundaries, its mode of reproduction and diffusion still remain. The virus enters the gallery space in the same way, as it would penetrate the host or the OS. Once inside, it undergoes a transformation by incorporating elements belonging to the infected host. In the case of Biennale.py, the virus puts on a nice dress and adapts to the environment in a parasitical way, by becoming an apparently innocuous art object. The presence in the gallery does not prevent the virus from reproducing and transforming, as it is reinserted back into the Web as an “artistic virus”, and it is spread by the art goers in the same way as it is transmitted online through our busy networks. In fact, it is thanks to the visitors that the virus is carried around and further spread, this time printed on T-shirts distributed during the exhibition.

Although the virus is not able to ever infect carbon-based organisms, its presence as a symbolic and visual form easily crosses spaces and invades both physical and digital realms. The continuous physical and contextual shift cannot but unveil the ductility and fuzzy nature of the virus.

In the last example the virus is portrayed as living across and dissolving the borders between the inside and the outside space, the virtual and the real domains, the public and the secret, undergoing a process of demystification through its reading as a poem and its display in the gallery space as a narrative. “Infrasense,” a work in progress co-produced by KIT and Robert Saucier, brings the process a step further (Infrasense, 2004). The installation represents Trojan Horses and bugs as entities that belong simultaneously to the digital space and the physical realm, that confuse the borders between two apparently incompatible spaces, show the intertwining and smoothness of such dynamic articulation and underscore the way the users become, in this context, also active carriers, transmitters, witnesses and narrators of the virus.

Instead of making a clear statement in defence of or as a commentary to computer viruses, “Infrasense” explores their very process of transmission and diffusion. This could unveil and eventually defeat the amount of prejudices and assumptions that undermine not only the way we perceive and construct it, but also the way we interpret the space that surrounds it.

The interactive installation, which at first sight seems to be constituted by a quite straightforward physical and animated reconstruction of different kinds of viruses, fighting for the survival in the gallery space, or a room-size rendering of a videogame, proves itself much more interesting. A series of mechanical horses, moving back and forth on a grid, immediately remind the audience of the Internet Trojan Horses, inspired from the epic wooden animal fabricated to deceive the Trojans and directly deriving from their computer-based heirs. Three Bugs constantly challenge the Trojan horses. They are controlled randomly by the gallery user through a handheld device located inside the space or from a website (Infrasense, 2004). Each Trojan Horse carries a backpack that looks like a hard drive: this element produces a certain curiosity in the visitor, who wonders what surprise or what threat the mysterious boxes could possibly unveil.

Disappointing as it may be, the boxes don’t contain any virus or any noxious device. On the contrary, they release recordings by local users who narrate their experiences with and personal stories about computer viruses. The volume of the speakers that deliver the narration is kept low, so that the gallery is filled with almost imperceptible but continuous noise, as if they reproduced the busy white noise of random networks in constant dialogue with each other. Once a bug, triggered by the user, approaches one of the horses, the volume of the speakers immediately increases and one of the voices becomes clear and starts narrating her story.

The voices of the narrators represent a quite interesting blurring of the assumed roles played by user and virus. In fact, the first is normally considered the victim of the latter, although in this case not only does she seem to be immune to the bug’s spell, but she also appears to reside inside the horse itself. In addition, the user appears to be responsible for receiving and, simultaneously, sending viruses, as she is actively operating behind both the handheld device and the website that trigger the bugs.

The ambiguous relation between the virus and its host clearly contests the widely-held assumption that in the case of a computer virus epidemic, the user affected tends to consider herself the sole innocent victim of an attack by an absolutely evil entity (the computer virus) equipped with an autonomous and independent agency. The victim, in this way, denies any responsibility, and refuses to admit not only that it is thanks to widely spread and busy networks that the diffusion of computer viruses is possible, but also that she might have participated, at least once, in such diffusion, by sending an innocuous e-mail or opening the wrong attachment.

The smooth and almost ubiquitous presence of the virus now rendered inside the gallery, now moving online, now psychologically internalised by the user shows the reciprocity between space and viruses. On the one hand, the space itself is able to unveil the complexity and almost fugitive nature of the virus. On the other hand, the virus itself reveals the intertwining and inseparability of differently perceived and usually separated dimensions of space. It is only with the thorough exploration of the installation that the user becomes gradually aware of such complexity.

The multifaceted nature of computer viruses, as well as their smooth and almost imperceptible movement across physical, virtual and psychic spaces is confirmed by the very format of the exhibition. Unlike most small (or non-mainstream) exhibitions, Infrasense is a touring show. Such decision has been necessary not only to show the nomadic and ubiquitous nature of the virus, but also to collect a rich database of experiences and stories narrated by a culturally and linguistically diverse crowd (Infrasense has already reached Canada, England and Belgium).

No clear statement is made on the danger or the benign nature of viruses: they seem to be portrayed as a substantial and naturally embedded presence of our daily life, something we cannot avoid facing. Viruses prove themselves to be inseparable from human beings (physically, and, in the case of computer viruses, psychologically), from OS, they are produced by and affect human beings, they are suspended between real and virtual in a space apparently free from any cultural hierarchy of location.

Conclusion

Foucault once affirmed that ‘Contradiction is the illusion of a unity that hides itself or is hidden: in any case, analysis must suppress contradiction as best as it can’ (Foucault, 1989, 1969: 168). In the case of the virus as a discursive form, admitting the existence of elements that contradict its intrinsic danger is not an option: once detected, such elements will be denied or hidden. Assigning the status of virus to entities that could potentially be ascribed to this category but would not manifest identical negative attributes is not allowed. When any possible positive aspect of the virus is eliminated, one is left with an absolute, yet coherent notion that only carries danger, fear and hazard. This set of attributes becomes the principle of cohesion that organizes the discourse about viruses and restores to it its hidden unity and internal order.

Artificially reducing the notion of virus to the above unity means validating a way of thinking where antithetic terms lie separated and confront each other. This mentality automatically deprives the virus of any positive connotation, therefore denying the existence of any kind of benign virus. In addition, as Franco Rella puts it ‘to read the immediate true expression of a totality beyond contradictions means thinking that certain subjects exist which are immune from contradiction, subjects which precisely because of their “purity” (or impurity, the insane, the marginal) are other from the society in which we live, bearers of values and needs that are inevitably incomprehensible to many forms of reasons’ (Rella, 1994, 1978: 15). Thus, the virus is, in this context, recognized as other, marginal and outside the norm established by a dominant social discourse.

However, if we accept the extreme complexity manifested by the virus in the above artistic interventions, we also admit the possibility of a formulation of a discourse that bypasses and goes beyond the usual categories and dichotomies intrinsic to and embedded in our language. The result could be a language potentially capable of expressing difference without naming it, of ‘knowing’ without ‘strangulating,’ (Deleuze, 1990) and without imposing a default ‘relation of forces’ (Foucault, 1980). Admitting a definition of virus as an unstable, undefined and somehow fugitive notion therefore would force us to reformulate old and worn-out postulates. For instance, the division between human beings, nature and technology would cease to exist, giving space to more pluralistic, non-hierarchic new articulations.

Currently, it seems very difficult to underscore what is culturally hidden or suppressed. Despite the innovative potential shown by the structure and phenomenology of computer viruses, the gallery goer or the observer will be always immediately attracted to the given notion and by the fascinating way in which such notion is apparently being subverted. What lies beneath is always left over or barely noticed. This constitutes an obstacle that still hasn’t been overcome. The cases examined clearly demonstrate the difficulty of viruses’ complexity to stand out.

Viruses, as I see them, are to human beings what the handwritten notes are to a book. Once you write them, they become part of the book. If you run out of space, you write between the lines themselves.

Author’s Biography

Roberta Buiani is a PhD Candidate in the Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture at York University (Toronto, Ontario). Her research is located at the intersection between arts, science and technology. She is currently working on a dissertation about computer viruses.

Notes

[1]“Negative aura,” inspired from Benjamin, strives to underscore the characterization of “virus” as a Modernist term, and its almost ritualistic value.

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References

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As an analogy to a computer virus, consider a biological disease that is 100% infectious, spreads whenever animals communicate, kills all infected animals instantly at a given moment, and has no detectable side effects until that moment. If a delay of even one week were used between the introduction of the disease and its effect, it would be very likely to leave only a few remote villages alive, and would certainly wipe out the vast majority of modern society. If a computer virus of this type could spread throughout the computers of the world, it would likely stop most computer usage for a significant period of time, and wreak havoc on modern government, financial, business, and academic institutions. (Fred Cohen, 1984)

We feel that “The Virus” is the “stranger”, the “other”, in our machine, a sort of digital sans papier—uncontrollable diversity. Once Hollywood, like Empire, finished killing “Indians” and the “Soviet Russians”, the Hollywood propaganda machine had to build other anti-Empire monsters to keep alive the social imaginary of 2001: aliens, meteors, epidemic… so many monsters. Now the “virus” equals damage, it is easier to sell the idea of a “full spectrum” anti-virus product that would “kill them all”, with no distinctions. Instead, our work says that there are many types of viruses: good, evil, entertaining, boring, elegant, political, furious, beautiful, and very beautiful. ‘There are no good viruses’, anti-virus producers say. (Luca Lampo, net art group [epidemiC], 2002)

Computer worms and viruses are not just technical entities, bits of digital code – they also express central traits of information culture. In a world where production focuses more and more on information instead of goods, an information error registers as a break-up within the system. [1] In capitalism, time is money and so too is information : a malicious piece of computer code seems to be an attack on the very basics of global order. The connection between information capitalism—a well-researched topic in itself—and computer viruses has not, however, been sufficiently explicated. [2]

Computer worms and viruses can be understood as accidents of digital culture. An accident, as Paul Virilio writes, is not in intended to mean the opposite of absolute and necessary, rather, the term signifies an inherent part of an entity since its production. Accidents are internal to technologies: ‘Since the production of any “substance” is simultaneously the production of a typical accident, breakdown or failure is less the deregulation of production than the production of a specific failure, or even a partial or total destruction.’ (Virilio, 1993: 212) The train introduced the train accident (Schievelbusch, 1977); with the boat came the boating accident; and data storage, such as film, includes the inherent ‘accident’ of erasure of information (Lundemo, 2003). In a similar fashion, computer viruses can be conceived as internal to the media ecology of digital capitalism.

This article deals with articulations of digital accidents, focusing especially on how the virus has been signified as a problem for national security, international commerce and the individual user. In information capitalism production is increasingly tied to information networks instead of physical regions, and information itself, in the form of entertainment, news services, communication services etc., is the ‘end product’ of production machinery: ‘The novelty of the new information infrastructure is the fact that it is embedded within and completely immanent to the new production processes. At the pinnacle of contemporary production, information and communication are the very commodities produced; the network itself is the site of both production and circulation.’ (Hardt & Negri 2001: 298) In other words, as Manuel Castells (1996) argues, the contemporary world is based on networks and paths of flow(s) that are informational, and digital technology provides the necessary background for this contemporary media society. What are at stake are not computers per se, but networks.

By offering an outline of a cultural history of computer viruses this article endeavours to expose the genealogical roots of contemporary discourse on information diseases. It considers three instances within the cultural history of computing that I find crucially important considering the fear of contagion increasingly evident in present-day discussions: anti-virus technologies, the ethics of computing and the figure of the responsible user. These themes are analysed as expressions of information capitalism based on digital communication, networking and connectivity. However, at the same time as the virus has been articulated as a problem of information capitalism, it has also been captured as a part of that same machinery. Anti-virus software became a lucrative business. In general, what I argue in the latter half of my article is that viruses and worms are not simple anomalies or “enemies” of digital capitalism, but an integral part of it. Hence, capitalism is viral in itself, meaning that its essence lies exactly in its capability of infecting the outside in order to replicate itself.. There is no absolute Other for the capitalist logic of expansion. What is crucial is the understanding of this constant double articulation of the virus as a threat and an integral part of the contemporary society. The seemingly contradictory themes of the virus as the threat and the essence of capitalism are, in fact, intertwined and operate in sync. The ideas of risk control, safety measures and the construction of the responsible user are thus to be read as integral elements of viral capitalism: with these elements, or discourses, the fear of computer viruses has been turned into a part of the flows of consumer capitalism, products and practices that “buy off” anxiety. My article will begin by outlining the historical elements that provide the background for the general operations of viral capitalism.

The Virus Risk

Computer viruses have been perceived as a problem since the beginning of the 1980s. The first officially recognized paper on viruses was Fred Cohen’s Computer viruses – Theory and Experiments, released in 1984. Cohen’s definition has since become a classic:

We define a computer ‘virus’ as a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself. With the infection property, a virus can spread throughout a computer system or network using the authorizations of every user using it to infect their programs. Every program that gets infected may also act as a virus and thus the infection grows. (Cohen, 1984)

Cohen was the first to emphasize the risks of computer viruses and similar sorts of self-spreading software programs. While earlier virus-like programs were tests within computer laboratories in universities, Cohen saw these mini-programs as serious threats to the whole of networked information society. Commentators have underlined that his work demonstrated the ‘universality of risk, and the limitations of protection’ (Slade, 1992), meaning that potentially every computer system was vulnerable. If we recall the quote from Cohen which prefaced this article, a computer virus equivalent to a biological disease that is absolutely infectious and spreads when communicating, would ‘stop most computer usage for a significant period of time, and wreak havoc on modern government, financial, business, and academic institutions.’ (Cohen, 1984). This was probably the first ‘worst-case-scenario’ concerning viruses—since then, similar predictions have been plentiful.

Cohen’s work was the first in a number of influential books, articles, papers and essays dealing with viruses. Time magazine – one of the first among the popular media to take up the virus issue (as early as 1985) – warned of the threat of malicious software and of hackers who wanted to sabotage computer systems with dangerous mini-programs (Murphy, 1985). In addition, the industry of anti-virus programs was born, and with it, new techniques and programs for virus recognition, destruction and prevention. Nowadays, technological anti-virus programs can be divided into three kinds:

1. Pre-emptive measures aimed at stopping the virus from entering the systems,
2. Virus-specific software for scanning particular, pre-determined signs or search strings which imply that a virus is present. These programs are often also able to remove the virus.
3. Generic detection software for searching system anomalies. By scanning for unusual behaviour within a computer, the program might be able to conclude that a virus or some other malicious mini-program is present. (Harley, Slade & Gattiker, 2001: 143–144)

The anti-virus industry had been growing since the first computer virus and worm incidents in 1986–1988, but doubts about the seriousness of the virus threat were also raised. Was the success of the industry due to superficially constructed hype, unfounded fears of killer viruses attacking the base of organized society? Users were intimidated with reports of hundreds of viruses spreading at the beginning of the 1990s, even if only 70–80 of these 600 known PC-viruses were encountered in real life; others were mostly research specimens and laboratory examples (Wilding, 1992: 66). The aim—conscious or not—was to create an atmosphere of ‘digital fear’ as illustrated in the following example from Virus Bulletin-magazine:

Rather like Hitler’s V1 ‘flying bomb’, no-one knows when or where a computer virus will strike. They attack indiscriminately. Virus writers, whether or not they have targeted specific companies or individuals, must know that their programs, once unleashed, soon become uncontrollable. It is, perhaps, the saddest indictment of these people that they are prepared to hurt anybody and everybody. (Virus Bulletin, 1989: 2)

Consequently, new viruses meant a boom for the anti-viral software industry. For example, the Michelangelo virus scare in 1992 raised public awareness concerning the threat of malicious software, especially in corporate environments. Sales of anti-virus programs went up with special ‘Michelangelo Limited Edition’ scanners. Because of the huge demand, there were even speculations that the virus originated within the anti-virus community itself in order to increase their profits. (Zajac 1992) This link does not however have to be intentional. It is part of the virality of capitalism that accidents and break-ups can be turned into elements of its productive flows. In this way, concerns about viruses were in total sync with the consumer products produced to relieve the anxieties of the new digital culture. Fear was “reconciled” by participating in the consumer market.

However, as Fred Cohen had already concluded, no anti-viral software could give absolute protection and purely technical solutions alone would be insufficient. Of course, the detection and recognition of viruses was the corner stone of a successful computer security policy, yet these procedures were not enough. Techniques for computer virus protection were to be understood as techniques for risk reduction, not removal:

anti-virus software can’t ‘stop’ viruses, any more than a police station can ‘stop’ crime. In a perfect world, a global social engineering programme (as social scientists understand it, rather than hackers) might attempt to educate computer users of all ages and persuasions in the mysteries of ‘ethical’ computing. However, it is not realistic to expect the application of a purely technological approach to individual systems to solve what is essentially a special case of a worldwide social problem. (Harley, Slade & Gattiker, 2001: 140)

Security, or the reconciliation of fear, was thus only postponed and not obtained at all. Security in the context of risk society is not something attainable but only a shifting horizon, or a limit, which can be approached. To put it another way, consumerist digital security functions according to the (Lacanian) logic of desire as lack: never finding fulfilment but rather always postponed.. This, as Deleuze and Guattari (1983) have shown us, is the essential coupling of psychoanalysis and consumer capitalism.

Digital Sanitation

Computers and so-called personal computing in particular represented a new phase in development of society. While a hundred years earlier, at the turn of the 19th-century, western societies in general had to cope with the new pressures of mass society, the computer culture of the 1970′s and 1980′s had to deal with similar problems of ‘over-crowdedness’. Alongside the technical safeguards mentioned above, the issue of security policy was raised, as was the more general question of the meaning of electronic interaction. The threats to internal security via networks and malicious software created an atmosphere of distrust, expressed in Ken Thompson’s frequently cited article ‘Reflections of Trusting Trust’ from 1984. Thompson was the 1983 Turing award winner for the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM). His point was simple: every piece of code is potentially malicious if it does not originate from oneself. ( Thompson, 1984; see also Ferbrache, 1992: 9)

Thompson’s statement of suspicion can be understood as an expression of a certain process of‘modernization and detraditionalization’ within the computer world. The birth of network computing also meant being in frequent contact with more and more people, most of whom would not be known. Implicitly Thompson posed the problem as follows: as long as self-reproducing programs are made by computer specialists everything is fine, but when this knowledge ends up in the hands of a wider public, the key institutions of society become threatened. Consequently, Thompson, and others after him, wished for an official recognition of the situation and the threats posed by these untrustworthy intruders. According to Thompson, the problem was a lack of general understanding of the security problems of digital culture. The utopia of connectivity was suddenly also producing connections that, it was feared, would jeopardize the whole system.

The problem of unethical computing broke news headlines when the first worm incident captured full media attention. The 1988 Morris- or Internet-worm was discussed on most major evening TV-news shows in the US and was visible in major newspapers as well. Originally intended as a harmless prank, the worm forced major parts of the Internet to shut down, causing huge amounts of loss of computing time. Named after the programmer, college student Robert Tappan Morris Jr., the worm had a bug that caused its uncontrollable spreading. Most noteworthy are the reactions within the media and the positions taken. (See, eg. Lundell, 1989: 1–18)

According to several commentators, the hacker behind the worm had attacked the very basis of an open society. The Morris worm incident, despite the huge amounts of literature on technical details of the worm, was defined as a human problem. One of the participants in the discussion, Eugene Spafford, notes that the problem was due to the fast pace of technological revolution. According to Spafford, while it was totally acceptable in the 1960′s that pioneering computer professionals were hacking and investigating computer systems, by the end of 1980s, the situation had changed. Society had become dependent on computing in general: ‘Entire businesses are now dependent, wisely or not, on the undisturbed functioning of the computers. Many people’s careers, property, and lives may be placed in jeopardy by acts of computer sabotage and mischief.’ (Spafford, 1989: 686)

So basically, the problem was not what Robert T. Morris did, but where he did it. The Internet had risen to become a symbol of the central trends within computerization and the whole of information capitalism. Networking, as perceived by Manuel Castells (1996, 2001), was the keyword of the late 20th-century information society, and the Internet in particular was to be the backbone of its digital infrastructure. The original technical open architecture resonated with cultural trends; in order to ease the spreading of networking, the internet-architecture was planned so as to leave freedom to the local network provider, facilitating the interworking of heterogenous networks. (See Leiner et. al., 1997; Abbate, 2000)

However, as the growing number of virus and worm incidents since the mid-1980′s demonstrated, open architecture could not be as open as had been hoped. Using the allegory of a (biological) disease that occurs in over-crowded circumstances (cholera, for example) commentators warned against the dangers of dirty computing practices that go hand-in-hand with the over-crowdedness of the emerging digital culture. Bryan Kocher saw the Morris worm as a ‘hygiene lesson’, referring to the incident’s similarities with all kinds of epidemic diseases:

Just as in human society, hygiene is critical to preventing the spread of disease in computer systems. Preventing disease requires setting and maintaining high standards of sanitation throughout society, from simple precautions (like washing your hands or not letting anyone know your password), to large investments (like water and sewage treatment plants or reliably tested and certified secure systems). (Kocher, 1989: 3 & 6)

Thus, Kocher presents information society in terms of an ecological system, with diseases that have to be weeded out in order for the healthy parts to grow. In other words, the flow of capital must be maintained through hygienic operations that keep the economy “healthy”. Disease is to be cured in order for the functional system to go on producing. While hygiene, cleanliness and order had been the central building blocks of 19th-century modernity, the same ideas were now being adopted as part of the media ecology of the computerized society of the end of the 20th-century. In this new context, the cultural idea of sickness continued to play the same pejorative and heavily loaded symbolic role as previously in cultural history. (See Sontag, 2002; Lupton, 1994: 560–562)

The Responsible User

At the centre of these “hygienic measures” stood the individual user. Since computers had, until the 1970s and 1980s, meant big constellations used by professionals in computing centres, the process of the individualization of digital culture changed the security emphasis. Computing and computer security had become a personal issue since the end of the 1970s and the rise of network environments. (Denning, 1979) [3] To quote Mark Drew:

Traditionally, computer security was someone else’s problem, invariably performed by someone else on behalf of the user. Distributed Computing has removed the traditional support personnel from the scene and made the user perform all the management roles: system programmer, analyst, engineer, support group, recovery manager, capacity planner, security officer, and so forth. PC viruses brought the issue of technology and support for end users to the forefront. Now the users had to make sure they could recover and perform the security officer role on their system. Many failed, most did not know what to do, others chose to ignore the problem, many were unaware. (Drew, 1994: 93)

The user found herself in a new situation. The change of computer culture from centralized, hierarchical systems based on mainframe computers to personalized, user-friendly desktop computers resonates with the general cultural change from a heavily centralized society of industrialism, Fordism and mass production to a network society of decentralized organization structures and individual responsibilities. [4] The individual person, whether at work or at home, became the consuming and producing computer user. She was understood as a valuable key point in keeping up the flows of capital, which appeared more and more in the form of digital data, of information, since the 1980′s. So, when Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote his The Postmodern Condition in the late 1970′s, he pinpointed computers as the key machines in the circulation of information. What Lyotard neglected was the fact that computers were no longer controlled by large institutions, but increasingly by individual users at home and at work. (Lyotard, 1979; Nye, 1997: 165 – 166) This trend became emphasized during the 1980′s.

The shift resulted in a huge amount of manuals and articles advising people as to safe computing habits. Write-protection, caution with new software, limiting accessibility, making back-ups, using specialized malware protection software, safe file-sharing and general awareness of computer activities were things that came to be expected of the user. (Van Loon, 2002: 165–166; see also, Brothers, 1990; Fites, Johnston & Kratz, 1989: 87–93). The user had to be educated to become a responsible computer user. Even if the personal computer revolution was based on such values as innovation, self-enhancement, experimentality and liberation, the reality was something different. [5] This is due to the fact that – as Jon Marshall (2003) has pointed out – knowledge workers have since the 1960′s been seen as key actors in the Post-Industrial or Informational Revolution. Hence, even if they are celebrated as the new hackers of digital culture (Himanen, 2001), they are simultaneously under several demands and pressures due to their importance as nodes within flows of money and information.

In addition to the ethics of computing, avoiding viruses became a responsibility often referred to as “safe hex”. As the AIDS-phenomenon raised the issue of responsible safe sex, computer viruses were understood as digital counterparts of sexually transmitted diseases. The computer virus crisis from 1989 defined safe hex using several key points, things to do and things not to do (Fites, Johnston and Kratz, 1989: 87–94). Among other issues the book advised reasonable care with programs. They should be purchased only from reputable dealers, while public domain programs and games downloaded from bulletin boards should be avoided. As in AIDS-discourse, sex with strangers became an irrational risk, and similarly computer security culture warned against the dangers of non-secure software. Aptly, one commentator advanced the following solution to the problem of effective virus protection: Increased awareness and motivation training for new computer users and for the population of future computer users, teaching them to be cautious, e.g., to avoid putting untrusted software into their computers as they would avoid putting tainted food into their bodies. (Parker, 1990: 552)

The connection between notions of the human body and care of the self and computer viruses has been noted by Susan Sontag (2002). Sontag analyses the political implications of AIDS rhetoric while also referring to how the metaphors moved into computer talk. These digital contagions borrowed from the language and articulations with which the HI-virus was animistically characterized. The segregation and marginalization of alleged “high-risk groups” was replicated also in computer virus culture, as analysed by Jeffrey Weinstock (1997). However, contrary to what Weinstock suggests, moral judgments are not absent from computer virus paranoia. As argued above, the individual users in general are at the centre of this discourse that tries to keep up the “normal” flow of information. The moralizing judgments are targeted against users who copy pirate games, download software from dubious BBS’s or net sites, or, as is often mentioned, visit pornographic websites. The creation of this morally responsible subject was part and parcel of the new digital order. As Deborah Lupton has argued, this was made comprehensible by a connection made with a public health discourse that stressed the individual’s responsibility ‘to stay healthy, avoid risk and resist indulgence in certain behaviours defined as “dangerous”’ (Lupton, 1994: 561).

For this reason, when Byte-magazine instructed its readers to ’Keep your PC Healthy’ (Williams, 1988), it was not just a metaphor but also an order-word (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 106–108), guiding the user to proper computing. Jerry Pournelle, also in Byte, similarly emphasized this when he writes:

The best way to avoid computer virus infections is to be careful where you get software. If you don’t put strange programs in your system, you can’t get strange results. That ‘free’ copy of a program you got from a bulletin board may be more costly than you think. You’re not even safe getting pirated software from a friend; even if there have been no signs of infection, some virus programs don’t wake up for a long time. (Pournelle, 1988: 199)

Flow and Disruption

Stefan Helmreich points out how computer viruses group together the interests of nation states and evolutionary capitalism. Computing discourse with its references to sexual contaminations provides a powerful image and justification for counter measures. Helmreich analyses how the idea of sexual intercourse putting the body at risk has endowed digital communication with sexist undertones: a vulnerable system is symbolically feminine, implying that safe computers are impenetrable, masculine and thus, male. Consequently, the issue is essentially a political one:

Computers are imagined as pristine, autonomous entities that exist prior to their embedding in networks—an idea that echoes the liberal conception of society as made up of individuals who exist prior to the society of which they are a part, an ideology deeply written into U.S. political culture. The Internet body politic is supposed to be made of rational actors, agents who enter responsibly into a kind of Rousseauian social contract. (Helmreich, 2000: 477)

But what about capitalism? In what way are the issues within the history of computer diseases analysed above connected to the notion of informational economy? As mentioned at the start of this paper, contemporary capitalism is essentially connected to the digital infrastructure. Digital flows—be it entertainment products, informational services or computer mediated communication—construct the essential backbone of a global economic regime. The deterritorialization of capitalism to encompass the whole globe depends on the networks of connection and communication that computerization and telecommunications have brought about. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri place this turn towards information capitalism in the 1970s and the end of the Vietnam War, after which transnational companies spread across the globe. Digital flexibility and informational networks are the key issue in this new global order, where ‘communication and control can be exercised efficiently at a distance, and in some cases immaterial products can be transported across the world with minimal delay and expense.’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 294–295) Thus, as Hardt and Negri suggest, the network is to be considered as the organizational model of production instead of the assembly line, the paradigmatic symbol of industrial capitalism.

In general, this theme of networks and knowledge production is part of the discussion concerning the ‘informationalization’ of the economy, a discussion that started during the 1960′s and 1970′s with the writings of Peter Drucker, Alvin Toffler and Daniel Bell. Jon Marshall has summarised the key points of these discussions as follows:

1. Knowledge or information is central to the “new economy” both to its organisation and to the production of wealth. Information is the society’s raw material. Facticity is important.
2. The use of Information Technology is changing society—it is a shift at least comparable to that from Agrarian Society to Industrial Society. There is often a technologically determinist ring to the argument.
3. Knowledge workers are central to this change—either as creative innovators or manipulators of symbols. They are forming an increasing percentage of the work force.’ (Marshall, 2003)

These themes have been pushed forward within capitalism for decades. In 1995, Bill Gates foretold the way digital networking would revolutionize the business world via improvements in productivity through such technologies as Web publishing, video conferencing, e-mail, etc. ‘Corporations will redesign their nervous systems to rely on the networks that reach every member of the organization and beyond into the world of suppliers, consultants and customers.’ (Gates, 1996: 153) According to Gates, especially the Internet was to provide ‘friction-free capitalism’, which is to be understood as a contemporary technological version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Quoting Gates: ‘We’ll find ourselves in a new world of low-friction, low-overhead capitalism, in which market information will be plentiful and transaction costs low. It will be a shopper’s heaven’ (Gates, 1996: 181).

Nicholas Negroponte (1995) offers a similar view of the future. According to Negroponte’s frequently cited ideas, the world is changing from atoms to bits. Hence, in the world to come, businesses will be dependent on digital information, selling bits, not things. In Negroponte’s prophetic and optimistic vision, the future world of information will be a world of expressing one’s selfhood and interacting with intelligent technological environments. Paraphrasing Being Digital, the information highway will provide a global marketplace where people and machines interact, without friction in a wonderland of never-ending digital consumption. This is basically what Manuel Castells refers to as the ‘faceless capitalist collective, made up of financial flows operated by electronic networks.’ (Castells, 1996: 474) Against this background worms and viruses have been judged as ‘loss of money’:

In a corporate environment when a virus is reported by an antivirus software, whether it is a false alarm or not, the normal flow of operation is interrupted. It takes at best several hours to contact the antivirus technical support and to make sure it was a false alarm before the normal operation is resumed. And, as we all know, time is money. And in the case of a big company, time is big money. (Gryaznow, 1995: T-7) [6]

Viruses appear primarily as disruptors that have to be shut out of the circuit in order to find the perfect equilibrium of communication, or the frictionless state of economical transactions. Thus, the view of viruses as disconnectors of flows of information and therefore also of flows of capitalism seems to fit nicely in with these articulations of “the new digital economy.” Truly, the virus-parasite seems to be the excluded third, as Michel Serres (1982) suggests. This is also in accordance with Deleuze’s idea of viruses as a form of luddism in contemporary culture.(Deleuze, 1990: 240–247) [7] Paraphrasing Deleuze, we may state that every society has its own kind of technical machine expressing the social machinery. While the industrial societies of modernity depended on thermodynamic machines, whose passive danger is entropy and active danger comes from sabotage, contemporary societies of control express themselves in terms of cybernetic machines handling information flows. Information interference, piratism and computer viruses are the dangers of this machinery, disrupting the flows of information. The capitalism of the 19th-century was based on the ownership of the means of production as well as the management of certain key places of production, but control societies are based on selling services and buying actions, deterritorialized as fluid networks of the global operations of money. In general, the central technological machines of capitalism (the typewriter, the calculating machine, the Turing machine, etc.) have incorporated the operations of abstraction, standardization and mechanization and the computer is no exception. With these technologies for the deterritorialization of production and money, wealth becomes increasingly an issue of exchange and circulation. The money commodity has found its ultimate form in the digitalization of money in the form of e-money and e-commerce, and, instead of presenting a sudden rupture, has followed the immanent logic of capitalism. (Cf. Gere, 2002: 19–30)

We must note, however, that although viruses and worms can be understood as disruptions within the technological dispositif of the society of control, they have other non-technological contexts as well. While ‘communications’ has been the general technological trend of computer culture since the 1960s, it has also grown to be the general expression of contemporary society to such an extent that one can talk about a society of communication. While digital technologies of connectivity provide the framework, the utopia of communication provides the horizon for contemporary notions of work and leisure within capitalism. The whole of capitalist culture is increasingly based on both material and symbolic communication—producing communication in a way that the content of what is communicated is more or less irrelevant. The pure fact of communication resonates with the needs of information capitalism. [8] The Nokia slogan ‘connecting people’ provides the ultimate crystallization of information capitalism. (See also Hardt & Negri, 2001: 346–347) Thus, the concept of virus as a disrupter of communications functions also on a more conceptual level, as a marker of the general accident (Virilio, 1993) of a digital culture based on connectivity.

These issues of ethics and responsibilities concerning malicious software are not to be understood as ideological constructs in the traditional sense, but as productions of desire. There is no false consciousness, hiding the real operations of capitalism. Instead, the figure of the responsible user is intrinsically linked to the idea of capitalism, which takes advantage of the accidents and disintegrations of flows. The problems of so-called malicious software were answered with the antidotes of anti-virus programs and ethics of computing, but the aim was not so much to keep the viruses out but to incorporate them as elements of the flow. Namely, malicious software programs such as viruses and worms have not been regarded solely as problems for information capitalism; they have also been converted, captured as a part of it. This idea stems from a conception of capitalism as an apparatus of capture, a machine of appropriation. The accidental form of the virus actually expresses the essential logic of capitalist digital economy perhaps in a similar fashion as the Serresian parasite is the excluded third but, at the same time, also the term making possible the functioning of the system. Disruptions are not excluded but short-circuited as part of the flexible machinery of capitalism. Perhaps this is also the fundamental meaning behind the idea of viruses as the general accidents of digital culture. Accidents are absolute and necessary, and all “substances” carry with them their own accidents. In a paradoxical manner, capitalism is its own accident, which is the constant breaking up and recreation of flows. Capitalism “evolves” via accidents in a manner that makes it possible to talk about “viral capitalism” and viruses at the heart of digital culture.

Following Deleuze and Guattari, we can state that capitalism works as an immanent axiomatic. Instead of understanding it as a regime of transcendental power, capitalism should be seen as working through an axiomatic of decoded flows; it actually is a generalized decoding of flows. Production does not flow to a privileged class of rulers, but ultimately towards itself, that is, towards the body of capital that deterritorializes constantly. Flows are decoded so that they can be connected to the capitalist machinery through axiomatics. Quoting Deleuze and Guattari:

Flows of property that is sold, flows of money that circulates, flows of production and means of production making ready in the shadows, flows of workers becoming deterritorialized: the encounter of all these flows will be necessary, their conjunction, and their reaction on one another—and the contingent nature of this encounter, this conjunction, and this reaction, which occur one time—in order for capitalism to be born […]. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 223–224)

Deleuze and Guattari emphasise that it is not so much the decoded flows but the process of generalized decoding, deterritorialization which is crucial to capitalism. This is to be understood through the notion of conjunction, the ultimate power of capitalism to appropriate the outside as a part of itself. Capitalism knows no limit (but schizophrenia) and continues to push itself forward. It is a continuing machine of the new, inventing itself all the time, refusing to tie itself to any final transcendent point. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, 223–250; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 20; see also Goodchild, 1996: 97–98) In this sense, no disruption of the capitalist logic is able to stay transcendentally Other in relation to that order. For the capitalist machine of decoding, nothing seems to be absolutely hostile.

In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri elaborate on these ideas. Their main point—following Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus—is that capitalism is immanent and works through the notion of empire. We do not live in a world of overcoding despotic imperial regimes, but of a global body of capitalism that emphasizes the continuing processual nature of informational culture. Capitalism lives in a perpetual state of metamorphosis and holds the ability to transform itself without reference to a transcendent order. Therefore, for Hardt and Negri, the capitalist axiomatic is:

[…] a set of equations and relationships that determines and combines variables and coefficients immediately and equally across various terrains without reference to prior and fixed definitions or terms. The primary characteristic of such an axiomatic is that relations are prior to their terms. (Hardt and Negri, 2001: 326–327)

Hence, the idea of a completely immanent and ever reforming capitalistic machine is able to convert and conjugate contradictory, minoritarian, disruptive and even potentially revolutionary constellations to itself. This is concretely illustrated by the case of computer viruses. Even if viruses act as disruptions of information and thus flows of money, they have been integrated as productive parts of the information hegemony. The years 1986 and 1987 saw the first more or less widespread viruses in the US, Brain and Leligh; and around 1987 and 1988 the first anti-virus program kits and companies emerged. Flushot, Vaccine, Antidote, Data Physician etc. mark not only the metaphorisation of the computer world as a biological system, but also, to put it bluntly, the capitalization of computer viruses with the rise of the anti-virus industry. Prevention of malicious software conjugates as part of the flow of informational capital. This marks the point where viruses, at least indirectly, are captured as parts of the flow. A quote from the website of the G-Connect Internet dealer testifies how viruses have been captured and normalized as a part of the flow of business revenues:

Customers are willing to pay extra for virus protection, especially if a service provider can transparently maintain this service without distributing software updates or upgrades. Using POPmaestro and an anti-virus server, virus protection can be quickly and easily implemented to generate profitable revenue, and increasing the stickiness of a service provider’s offering. (G-Connect, 2004)

In addition, flexible global capitalism lives at the heart of the anti-virus discourse, as Stefan Helmreich notes (2000: 485–487). Computers and anti-virus protection are modelled on discourses that emphasize adaptation, flexibility, agility and adjustability. (See Martin, 1994) These features have been emphasized especially since the early 1990s with the introduction of polymorphous viruses, which are able to create numerous variations of themselves, rendering them potentially invisible to traditional virus scanners.

What Helmreich does not point out, however, is that viruses also act in accordance with this evolutionary capitalism. Polymorphous viruses are programs that are capable of adjusting and adapting, just as capitalism in general as described by Deleuze and Guattari as well as Hardt and Negri. Paradoxically, then, capitalism itself is viral, advancing via mutations and adaptations within heterogeneous systems (See Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 10). Capitalism has no external limit, only an internal one, which is capital itself. Hence capital replicates itself via a constant displacement, a constant process of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. This is also a constant process of “introducing breaks and cleavages” with which reshape and remodel its order. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 230–233)

Capitalism also creates its own machines, Deleuze and Guattari continue. The network virus as a way of operating crystallizes the logic of capital, the two being conceptually intertwined. The virus as a specific, non-linear form of evolution proceeds via rhizomatic jumps between heterogeneous elements, for example between different species. At the same time, it brings along its own bits of information with which to capture the code of the new host. Similarly, capitalism can be conceptualised as a molecular coupling that – due to its immanent nature, expressed in the universal code of money and nowadays with the equally universal power of the digital code – can adapt to foreign places and anomalous contexts. Capitalism functions via a constant folding of the outside and the inside.

Hence the idea of capitalism as a (computer) virus designates the actual functioning of the system. If ‘computer’ is understood as the technical machine operating the decoding of flows of the abstract machine of capitalism, then is not the virus conceptually at the centre of this social machine as well? While viruses are a logical part of the computer system in that they use the normal operating and programming procedures of computers, they are also to be understood as essential parts of the logic of capitalism. ‘Like a missionary or a vampire, capital touches what is foreign and makes it proper’, write Hardt and Negri, and we might add that, like a virus, capital keeps transforming the world with its own piece of program code, spreading without an internal limit. (Hardt and Negri, 2001: 226) [9] In a way, capitalism invents these kinds of accidents and risks in order to keep itself busy. This idea of ‘if it’s not broken, break it’ provides an apt description of the functioning of the so-called information capitalism. (See Murphie and Potts, 2003: 186–187, 190–191) Dangers and risks produce excellent needs and products in the consumer market, which aims to provide tools for controlling the uncertainties and anxieties of everyday life. (See Bauman, 1993: 204–205) In this sense digital capitalist culture seems to be maybe the first one that has really succeeded in converting its own accidents to its own profit. This, of course, as has been analysed above, is due to the internal functioning of this cultural machinery, aptly expressed in the technicality of the universal machine of computer, able to potentially simulate the functioning of any other machine. This universality at the heart of the technical machine acting within the more abstract machine of digital capitalism means in other words the potentiality to code all the world according to its own image.

In this light, the discourses of fear, risk control, user education and other safety measures are in fact also an expression of this viral capitalism. Through an effective feedback loop and short-circuiting of disruptions and interruptions, threats of capitalism are turned into general fears and risks, which in turn are translated into consumer products that aim to control that fear and deliver safety. In our case, this refers to the complex discourses and practices of anti-virus software and digital security policies. The truly responsible user is one who takes care of herself and her loved ones by protection—and, as it happens, influential part of the protection comes in the form of commodity products.

Epilogue: Viral Art

In my article I have mapped the paradoxical position of the computer virus within digital capitalist culture. Computer virus research was captured as a productive part of the system of information society, countering the potentially disruptive breakage induced by viral programs. Computer viruses and worms were, however, continually represented as damage inflicting products of psychotic persons. (See, for example, Highland, 1988) These one-sided notions of computer viruses have been called into question during the past few years within some net art-projects, which offer maybe the most profound understanding of this contemporary phenomenon. This understanding means a kind of “rendering-visible”, an exposition, of the internal machinery of the virus event. As quoted at the beginning of the article, Luca Lampo, from the art group [epidemiC], describes the discourse of computer viruses as connected to the general mental history of Occidental thought that has tried to rule out the Other as an ‘uncontrollable diversity’. Lampo notes how this discourse is inherently tied to the business of virus protection:

Now the “virus” equals damage, it is easier to sell the idea of a “full spectrum” anti-virus product that would “kill them all”, with no distinctions. Instead, our work says that there are many types of viruses: good, evil, entertaining, boring, elegant, political, furious, beautiful, and very beautiful. ‘There are no good viruses’, anti-virus producers say. (Lampo, 2002)

Contemporary technological risks are very much media risks, and computer viruses are also media viruses, meaning that they are perceived, valorized and signified within the simulacra of contemporary media. (Van Loon, 2002) This is what Lampo in general refers to as the Hollywood production machinery, which constructs ever-new aliens and monsters, lining up computer viruses with such previous dangers as ‘Indians’ and ‘Soviet Russians.’ And Lampo’s Hollywood is deeply tied to other interests as well. As briefly noted earlier, computer viruses and worms have so far been articulated according to the perspectives of the State and the international economic system. These definitions have served as important mediators with which the very concrete notion of viruses as damagers of organized society have been transformed into a productive instance of that very same system. To upkeep this productivity, it has also been important not to consider the multiplicity of viruses there actually is, and not to introduce public, free remedies to the problem that is constantly touted.

The net art groups [epidemiC] and 0100101110101101.ORG participated in the Venice Biennale of 2001 in an exhibition aimed at exposing this unquestioned status of viral programs. They programmed the Biennale virus with a new programming language Python and presented it as a piece of net art. Loyal to the traditions of media art, their art work can be understood as taking an everyday element of media culture and decontextualizing it in order to map the networks of power and articulation that signify it in our everyday life.

Biennale Source Code © 0100101110101101.ORG

The virus was intended to show how viruses and media are deeply connected: viruses live on media coverage, a certain hysteria or paranoia of contagion. The Biennale virus source code was printed on T-shirts and sold on CD-ROMs in order to turn upside down the one-sided understanding of viruses.

As the artists themselves explained:

Additionally, by showing the code in the pavilion, by printing it on t-shirts and post cards, we want people come close to it, and so demystify the aura of a virus. They can find out how it looks like, and that it works exactly as any other software. (Cited in Sollfrank, 2001)

Another similar exposition of computer viruses and worms within media art took place with the I Love You-exhibition in Germany (2002–2003). The underlying theme of I Love You seemed to be the sheer multiplication of the notions of viruses: viruses were understood in the exhibition not just as an economic threat but also as aesthetic creations, acts of resistance and cultural constructions. [10] For example, the net artist Jaromil (2002) describes viruses as poetry that resists uniform majoritarian (digital) language, bringing in unexpected elements within the flow of communication:

In considering a source code as literature, I am depicting viruses as though they were the sort of poems written by Verlaine, Rimbaud et al., against those selling the net as a safe area for straight society. The relations, forces and laws governing the digital domain differ from those in the natural. The digital domain produces a form of chaos—which is inconvenient because it is unusual and fertile—on which people can surf. In that chaos, viruses are spontaneous compositions which are like lyrical poems in causing imperfections in machines ‘made to work’ and in representing the rebellion of our digital serfs. [11]

How does this, then, relate to the connections between capitalism and informationalism that I have been describing? Why bring in these ideas by net artists of viruses as poetry? The answer lies in Jaromil’s writing: he continues by arguing that ‘making the digital language stutter’ is a political act. Viruses as poetry of the computer networks are aimed at battling the capitalist powers who dream ‘of turning the Net into a virtual shopping area for their own forms of business’. These conceptions do not have to be interpreted as a form of irresponsible vandalism or a criminal state of mind, but as culturally and historically critical acts trying to expose the functioning of discursive and non-discursive networks of power within contemporary society, the complex interminglings of viruses, anti-viruses and capitalist axiomatics. Consequently, when Nicholas Negroponte (1995: 229) exuberantly states that ‘[l]ike a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped’, we have to remember that every ecological system has its parasites and viruses that question the notion of linear predetermined progress; capitalist and technological determinism are challenged by ‘the uncontrollable diversity’ introduced by viruses.

Author’s Biography

Jussi Parikka is a licentiate of philosophy and a doctoral student at the Department of Cultural History, University of Turku, Finland. He is working on his thesis on the cultural history of computer worms and viruses. His other research interests include the interconnections of Man and Machine, poststructuralist media theory as well as the questions of media history, especially media archaeology. Homepage at:

Notes

[1] A computer virus is a tiny piece of programming code, ranging from 10 kilobytes to 30 kilobytes. It is designed to attach a copy of itself to a host program, potentially infecting and spreading infinitely. Often computer viruses also include a ‘trigger’ and a ‘payload’. This means, for example, that a virus will trigger after, say, fifty boot-ups, releasing its payload. These payloads vary: some viruses play a song, others format your hard disk, and some do nothing out of the ordinary. Some classic viruses have dropped letters off the screen one by one, imitated the Yankee Doodle tune and printed insults. While a virus attaches itself to other programs, computer worms are self-contained and do not need to be part of another program to propagate. Basically, and technically, these are two different kinds of programs. In this article I, however, use the term ‘virus’ in a general manner to refer to self-spreading computer programs without necessarily making the distinction.

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[2] On cultural theory concerning viruses, see e.g. Helmreich (2000), Lupton (1994), Ross (1990) and Sampson (2004).

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[3] Narratives of computing during the 20th century are analysed in Suominen (2003). He argues for a three-phased understanding of computerized modernity: 1) the age of attraction (1920–1958), 2) the age of automation and integration (1958–1973), and 3) the age of intimacy and personal computing (1973–).

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[4] The notion of moving responsibilities and risks to the individual is a general theme of risk society as defined by Beck (1986). As Bauman (1993: 203) notes, collectively produced risks are placed on individuals; controlling risks is turned into an individual project.

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[5] In Byte-magazine this novel situation of personal computing was also seen as problematic: “No one truly wants personal computer security. Access control, passwords, authorizations, and the procedures needed to enforce them are all part of the old world of mainframes: Microcomputers are about freedom and simplicity, not bureaucracy.” (Kochanski 1989: 257). In general the issue of the educated user had to do with the new phenomenon of commercial software designed for the public, the lay user. For example, in 1984 the Scientific American articulated the importance of computer literacy, of teaching average people correct computing: ‘What then is computer literacy? It is not learning to manipulate a word processor, a spreadsheet or a modern user interface; those are paper-and-pencil skills. Computer literacy is not even learning to program. That can always be learned, in ways no more uplifting than learning grammar instead of writing. Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable. As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?’ (Kay 1984: 47)

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[6] In the same European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research (EICAR) conference of 1995 Urs Gattiker acknowledged the problem viruses present for the Information Highway and the business opportunities in networking businesses on the Internet: ‘For managers and policy makers alike the flourishing InfoBahn [Information Highway] is making it difficult to ensure a safe and natural progression of use of this technology. Everyone is anxious to capitalize on this new frontier. Growth has been incredibly rapid and those organizations who have not already established an InfoBahn presence may miss golden business opportunities. With the rapid computerization of information and data, however, protecting privacy and safety/security of data subjects and information systems becomes crucial while simultaneously maintaining the viability and accessibility of information. The freedom to acquire information will be facilitated by the hybridization of the telephone, television and the computer. Data collection will become easier with each evolution of technology. Data subjects will become information.” (Gattiker 1995: P1-14)

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[7] In 1975 John Brunner (1976) wrote his The Shockwave Rider science fiction novel, which introduced a similar conception of viruses: in a world controlled by Orwellian procedures of digital surveillance and control, viruses—or tapeworms as Brunner calls them—are entities of disruption and resistance that expose the logic of power operating in the novel’s world.

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[8] The Finnish philosopher Jussi Vähämäki has analysed this culture of communication, drawing on the works of Gilles Deleuze, Guy Debord, Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato, among others. See e.g. Vähämäki 2003. On the utopia of communication at the heart of digital culture see Flichy 2001.

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[9] Viral capitalism is exemplified in the so-called commercial viruses or ‘viral marketing’, a kind of an elaborated version of chain letters and spam. See Harley, Slade & Gattiker 2001: 409. On the principles of the ‘new economy’ as expressed in the mid-1990s, see Tapscott 1996; Kelly 1997.

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[10] See the I Love You-exhibition catalogue at http://www.digitalcraft.org/index.php?artikel_id=244.

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[11] This conception of digital language can be understood for example through a Deleuze-Guattarian view of language as rhizomatic. Language and writing are not images, representations of the world, but intertwine, work within the world. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 3–8)

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Contagion and Transmission

In contemporary popular culture, ideas about contagion are often tied up with ideas about information transmission. The film 28 Days Later, for instance, opens with a harrowing scene in which primates undergo medical experiments by being exposed to large doses of violent media images. Though the link between these images and the ‘rage virus’ that takes over the British Isles is never explained, the film abstractly puts forth the idea that there is some relation between media image and biological virus. The Japanese horror film Ringu takes this a step further, imaging a videotape, which causes its viewer to suffer a mysterious death. Rumors about the videotape begin circulating and the videotape itself becomes a kind of vector for the contagious and ultimately fatal images. But it is not only in film that such connections between contagion and transmission are expressed. The online, multiplayer video game Resident Evil: Outbreak takes the contagion-transmission link even further in its existence as a network-based game. The game follows the narrative of many of the other Resident Evil games, in which a secret corporate bioweapons program runs amok, releasing its experimental virus into the unsuspecting population of a nearby city. One of the aims of the game is not only to contain the spread of the epidemic (which has the effect of turning its host into a flesh-eating zombie), but also to exterminate those that are already infected. As an online, multiplayer game, Resident Evil: Outbreak is actually played in real-time over the Internet, with other players who take on other roles or characters in the game world. Thus the biological network of the epidemic within the diagesis of the game world is layered onto the informatic network or technical infrastructure, which enables the game to be played. In addition, players in the game must gather various bits of information regarding the status of the epidemic in the infected city (urban regions infected, number of civilians infected, number of kills), making the game a hybrid of typical ‘FPS’ (first-person shooter) games and a public health computer simulation.

What each of these examples does is to raise the issue of the relation between contagion and transmission, or between the assumed materiality of biology, and the assumed immateriality of information. We are accustomed to thinking of contagion as a biological or epidemiological term, which is then metaphorized into non-biological contexts to speak of computer ‘viruses,’ cultural ‘memes,’ or ‘viral marketing.’ Conversely, information is colloquially thought of as an abstract, immaterial entity that may exist in different physical media (DVDs, CDs, or hard drives). Classical information theory, which states that ‘the semantic aspects of information are irrelevant to the engineering problem’ (Shannon and Weaver, 1965: 31), still influences many of the basic assumptions in the construction and maintenance of information networks today. In short, the concept of contagion presumes a materiality that can then be abstracted into metaphor, while the concept of information assumes an immaterial form or pattern that can then be materialized in a range of physical media.

For this reason, it is no surprise that a great number of horror films combine epidemics with the figure of the zombie, or the ‘living dead.’ Zombies always seem to result from the contagion of biological epidemics, as if the ultimate fear of contagion was not simply death itself, but a death beyond death, a ‘living death’ in which the biological is exclusively biological, in which the self is nothing but a body. But the figure of the zombie has also gone through many metamorphoses, from the earliest films (e.g. White Zombie) depicting eroticized Haitian voodoo rituals, to the American and Italian splatter horror films of the 1970s (the films of Romero and Fulci), in which zombies are often metaphors for the ‘silent majority.’ However contemporary genre horror (in film, fiction, games, and comics) adds a twist to the familiar motifs of the zombie film: the role of information in either transmitting, propagating, or even producing contagion. In its own language of genre motifs and campy self-reflexivity, contemporary zombie horror asks an interesting question: how is our understanding of biological epidemics affected by our ambient environment of computer and information networks? That is, how does transmission affect contagion, and vice-versa? Traditionally, zombie films represent the paradox of the living dead as the ‘animate corpse’ or the state of being nothing but the ‘bare life’ of a body. The horror of contemporary ‘living dead’ is not just the fear of being reduced to nothing but body, but, in the ‘network society,’ perhaps the horror of the ‘living dead’ is the fear being reduced to nothing but information – or not being able to distinguish between contagion and transmission. In this sense the paradox of the living dead is also the paradox of ‘vital statistics,’ a sort of living dead network that exceeds and even supercedes the ‘bare life’ of the organism.

A Note on Method

In a sense, emerging technoscientific fields are more avant-garde than the most avant-garde cultural theory. Hybrid DNA chips, neural cells communicating across the Internet, enzyme-based ‘wet’ computers, in vitro DNA libraries, and computer immune systems are all examples of this vanguard character of contemporary technoscience. Indeed, one of the unique characteristics presented by the artifacts of technoscience is that they seem to demonstrate their contingencies, their modes of knowledge-production, their performative laboratory contexts, and their disciplinary and institutional sites. I speak of such artifacts with a degree of vitalism (and irony) because, in many cases, they demonstrate something in their performance that is in excess of the intentions and discourses that enframe them; they increasingly demand to be considered as fleshy but nonhuman. They are artifacts that not only perform biological labor and produce information, but they are artifacts that also intervene in human decision-making and action.

Such artifacts demand a mode of critical engagement that is as uncanny as they are, expressing a sense of the most everyday that is the most unbelievable. Gilles Deleuze suggests one such approach, in his notion of the ‘diagram.’ In its colloquial sense, a diagram is a graphical mode of representation that is used to conceptualize a process or to produce a model (a workflow diagram, a technical diagram). In this way, a diagram is an analytic tool, a visual artifact pointing to its referent. But a diagram also brings forth relationships between entities in a system that are not apparent in the system itself; it also reveals latent, existing relations, and as such it may cut across traditional distinctions. It is this abstract and concrete character of the diagram that Deleuze emphasizes when he speaks of power relations as being ‘diagrammatic.’ For Deleuze, ‘the diagram is no longer an auditory or visual archive but a map, a cartography’ (1999: 34). Furthermore, ‘every society has its diagram(s),’ its unique topology of the discursive and non-discursive, ‘the map of relations between forces that constitute power’ (1999: 35, 36).

A diagrammatic method revolves around the issue of form. In the work of Michel Foucault, Deleuze identifies a constant interplay between a form that organizes ‘matters’ (e.g. the prison, the hospital, the school) and a form that canalizes ‘functions’ (punishing, curing, educating). Now, neither of these aspects of form can be reduced to the other (for instance, ‘curing’ cannot be reduced to the hospital). But, asks Deleuze, is there a common term that stitches or weaves them together? For Deleuze, the diagram is this topological relation within the forms of power relations, an ‘immanent cause that is coextensive with the whole social field’ (1999: 37). Foucault is therefore less a ‘new historian’ and more a ‘new cartographer,’ drawing out points, relations, and topologies.

Deleuze points to three characteristics of the diagram, characteristics that will guide this essay. First, each diagram abstracts a ‘spatio-temporal multiplicity,’ existing in a way that occupies topologies of all sorts (geographic, economic, biological topologies). Deleuze gives the example of Foucault’s history of madness, in the shift from the ‘leprosy’ diagram of the Middle Ages (which functions by excluding and dividing) to the ‘plague’ diagram of the early modern era (which functions by including and regulating). A second feature of the diagram is that it is ‘continually churning up matter and functions in a way likely to create change’ (1999: 35). Diagrams are always about to undergo a phase change, as when Foucault describes hospital reforms in pre-Revolutionary France as a combination of sovereign (state-mandated) and disciplinary (surveillance) diagrams. Finally, Deleuze states that the diagram ‘produces a new kind of reality’ by drawing out ‘unexpected conjugations or improbable continuums’ that constitute a particular object of study (1999: 35).

The diagram provides a cross-section, a transversal (similar to the transverse cross-sections used on frozen cadavers in digital anatomy). Diagrams cut across separate organs and organ systems, they cut across institutions, governments, social classes, technical paradigms, and cultural forms. The resultant view is very different from the anthropomorphic body politic, though still familiar, if only in a dizzying way. Given that Deleuze is often referenced as the philosopher of becoming, we may be inclined to think of a diagram as that which reveals the ‘becoming’ of the event. But I would argue instead that a diagram is more like a demonstration, a technical ‘demo’ of something that is already in effect. A diagrammatic method would therefore draw out the ‘demo’ function of each particular context. At its most extreme, a diagrammatic approach is simply a crafted series of juxtapositions. The diagram appears to simply present information, a montage of data and flesh, an artifactual dérive.

Information Security / Mathematical Epidemiology

Let us begin with the separate fields of information security and mathematical epidemiology. The cultural con-fusion between contagion and transmission mentioned above has its analogue in these two related fields. In information security, biological tropes are used to understand computer ‘viruses’ and design ‘computer immune systems.’ In mathematical epidemiology, mathematical, statistical, and probabilistic methods are used to study the dynamics between populations and disease, which is now being extended in the use of computers to simulate and forecast epidemic outbreaks.

However, it is not the case that we begin with two separate fields (biology and informatics) which are then fused together via contemporary technoscience, and neither is it the case that a primary unity is subsequently bifurcated into the material (biology) and immaterial (information) domains. Instead what we see is a continual process of differentiations, transdifferentiations, and connections of terms that are at once ontological and thoroughly pragmatic – that is, a diagram.

In the case of information security, biological tropes began being applied to accidental or intentionally caused glitches in computer systems in the mid-1960s, with the first intentionally designed computer viruses (e.g. ‘Darwin’ and ‘Cookie Monster’). Many of these vague uses of biologically-inspired terms were crystallized in the work Fred Cohen, whose writings on computer viruses were published in the 1980s, just as personal computing and civilian Internet technologies were gaining momentum. The language of computer ‘viruses’ and ‘infected’ computer systems continue to characterize more recent descriptions of Trojan horses, Internet worms, and ‘5th generation polymorphic’ viruses. Currently, information security has expanded its approach to include ‘adware,’ ‘spyware,’ and even ‘spam’ email. Generally speaking, information security concerns itself primarily with ensuring the ongoing systemic integrity of a given computer system or network. This, of course, involves a number of procedures, from identifying what a ‘system’ or ‘network’ is (e.g., an individual computer or a local network of computers), to devising techniques for preventing intrusion and infection (e.g. ‘firewalls’ and ‘anti-virus’ software). Not surprisingly, the rhetoric of war often accompanies the biologically inspired concepts of information security, which has had the effect of making information security for the average user an everyday battle.

However, the basic premise of information security is that specific types of computer behaviors can be understood through the lens of biology. If, as the analogy goes, a piece of software can infiltrate and infect a computer system just as a virus can infiltrate and infect a biological system, then it follows that the best way to prevent such attacks is to construct an ‘immune system’ for the computer. As one research article states, ‘improvements [in computer security] can be achieved by designing computer systems that have some of the important properties illustrated by natural immune systems’ (Forrest et al., 1996: 1). Furthermore, just as immunology is predicated on the ‘self-nonself’ distinction, ‘the problem of protecting computer systems from malicious intrusions can similarly be viewed as the problem of distinguishing self from nonself’ (Forrest et al., 1996: 3). In addition, designing such computer immune systems require not just the micro-view of immunology, but also a knowledge of the macro-view of epidemiology, or how infectious agents spread throughout a population. The research on ‘computer epidemiology’ makes just this argument. For instance, Kephart et al. (1993) that a focus on the modes of distribution of computer viruses, including their birth rates, death rates, incident, and threshold, can offer a more effective, global view of how computer viruses affect not just single machines, but entire networks of machines.

Most recently, this view has influenced the emerging field of ‘network science,’ whose scope is not limited to the biological or informational domains, but proposes a synoptic view of networks as both ubiquitous and universal. Albert-László Barabási’s work on ‘scale-free’ networks (in which few nodes are highly connected, a many nodes are minimally-connected) has suggested that traditional methods of tracking down computer viruses are determined to fail in complex networks (Barabási, 2002: 123-42). Instead, Barabási suggests that an approaches that ‘discriminate between the nodes, curing mostly the highly connected nodes, can restore a finite epidemic threshold and potentially eradicate a virus’ (Barabási and Dezsno, 2002: 1). In other words, the points of a network that are the most connected are also the most vulnerable to attack or infection. Countering the spread of a computer virus or worm will depend not on targeting individual pieces of software, but on managing the traffic at the most busy nodes or hubs within a network.

These are all examples of the way in which biology influences computer science – or, to be more specific, the ways in which concepts and models from immunology and epidemiology influence information security. But the reverse also occurs, and in this regard, epidemiology is an important hinge between computer science and biology. While recent information security research has incorporated the metaphors and concepts of epidemiology, the much lengthier history of epidemiology shows a close relation to mathematical and informatic modes of understanding disease at the macro-level. In 17th century London, the weekly mortality tables compiled by parish clerks provided the basis for the demographic studies of John Graunt, whose mathematical analyses reveal trends in infant mortality and fatal diseases in select urban areas. [1] Another statician, William Petty, characterized such studies as ‘political arithmetic’ or ‘political anatomy.’ [2] This mathematical view of death and disease as the macro-level are, as Michel Foucault points out, intimately tied to the intersections of politics and medicine of the time. The controversies surrounding the English Poor Law, the medical reforms of the Hôtel Dieu in Paris, and the development of a system of ‘medical police’ in Prussia, are all profoundly connected to the growing interest in a quantitative, mathematical view of disease at the macro-level. [3] This ‘statistical enthusiasm,’ as historian Ian Hacking calls it, was not only concerned with charting the spread or patterns of a population’s health, but it was also centrally concerned with the articulation of specific categories into which disease and population types could be set. ‘Enumeration demands kinds of things or people to count’ (Hacking, 1982: 280).

Epidemiology, in its historical context, was not just a matter of counting, however. It required an ‘open field’ of observation, and an analytical sensibility that could encompass the indeterminate. An epidemic disease was not an autonomous entity that could be enclosed in a box, or categorized in a table; its totality lay precisely in its continual or recurring nature. Throughout the 18th century, epidemiology came to be opposed to the classificatory science of nosology, and it was this time-based, distributed view that led to the recognition of the network effects of disease: ‘The analysis of an epidemic does not involve the recognition of the general form of the disease, by placing it in the abstract space of nosology, but the rediscovery, beneath the general signs, of the particular process, which varies according to circumstances from one epidemic to another, and which weaves from the cause to the morbid form a web common to all the sick’ (Foucault, 1973: 24). In this sense, the concurrent observations of John Snow and William Budd, both studying the effects of cholera in the 19th century, can be seen as demonstrations of this point. [4] In particular, Snow’s famous epidemiological maps of south London reveal a concept that is central to network thinking: the layering, in one space, of different types of networks (e.g. networks of infection, networks of water pumps and sewage channels, and the overall socio-economic topology that described the particular Broad Street neighborhood).

What we can highlight in epidemiology is a two-fold network consciousness: an awareness of ‘epidemics’ as discrete entities displaying network properties, and, inseparable from this, an awareness of the need for network-based techniques for analyzing, mapping, and securing against epidemics. Influenced by the mathematical epidemiology of Norman Bailey, contemporary network science has taken up many of the lessons of epidemiology – as well as information security. As Duncan Watts notes, ‘viruses, both human and computer, essentially perform a version of what we have been calling a broadcast search throughout a network,’ a mode of propagation in which ‘the more contagious a virus is, and the longer it can keep the host in an infectious state, the more efficient it is at searching’ (Watts, 2003: 166). Thus, understanding the characteristics that define an epidemic is a first step towards devising strategies for counteracting it. For this reason, it is no surprise that surveillance, or the gathering of information, is a central part of public health and epidemiology. ‘The old simple schema of confinement and enclosure – thick walls, a heavy gate that prevents entering or leaving – began to be replaced by the calculation of openings, of filled and empty spaces, passages and transparencies’ (Foucault, 1979: 172). It is this shift towards contagion and/or transmission that we are witnessing today.

Pathogenic Information vs. Informed Pathogens

So we have two separate fields, each of which integrates informatics and materiality differently through a network paradigm – this last part is crucial. If information security tells us that certain kinds of computer behavior can be understood through the lens of epidemiology, then it is equally important to note that modern epidemiology tells us that infectious disease can be understood through the lens of mathematics, statistics, and informatics. In one the basic idea is that we can understand particular types of computer behavior through the lens of biology, while in the other the basic idea is that we can understand infectious disease through the paradigm of informatics.

This uneven, twofold integration results, however, in two opposing ontological positions. Recall our opening discussion regarding contagion and transmission. While the view of contagion presumes a condition of biological materiality, that can then be abstracted into metaphor (computer ‘virus’), when contagion is considered within epidemiology, it also implicitly links contagion with material and biological processes of rate of infection, logistic growth, and epidemic thresholds, encapsulated in the often-referenced SIR (susceptible-infected-removed) model. [5] But these material and biological processes are, in epidemiology, also informational processes that reflect the specific topology of an infectious disease. Mathematical epidemiology, despite its abstruse qualities, must, by definition refer to a real biological-material condition (if for no other reason than this material condition provides the basis for data abstraction).

But the same conundrum also holds for the view of transmission, and the field of information security. While the view from classical information theory assumes an immaterial core that can then be instantiated in a range of material, physical media (the assumption behind simple file conversions), transmission is also never separate from its materiality. Indeed, there is a ‘materiality of informatics,’ in that the classical separation of ‘message’ from ‘channel’ is only a heuristic means of assessing the accuracy of information transmission. The reality is that information is never separate from its channel, just as the message is never separate from its medium. Not only does the supposedly immaterial quality of information always require a material substrate (radio towers, fiber optic cable, WiFi transmissions), and not only does information ‘matter’ in its social effects, but transmission is inseparable from its materiality.

Therefore, while the relationship between contagion and transmission is not an exactly symmetrical one, we can derive two distinct positions. While information security views information as being immaterial, epidemiology is predicated on the assumption that information is material. In the former position what we see is pathogenic information – that is, information in the classical, technical sense that has become ‘viral’ – while the latter position what we see are informed pathogens – that is, biological epidemics that, through epidemiology, become information-dense entities. From this, we can say that information security, as a field, deals with pathogenic information, while mathematical epidemiology deals with informed pathogens.

Both, however, are united in their use of the ‘network paradigm’ to comprehend their objects of study. In both cases, the ‘network’ serves as the model through which the apparently disparate phenomena of infectious disease and computer processes can be analyzed. However, while the view of pathogenic information (information security, computer ‘viruses’) assumes information as immaterial, the view of informed pathogens (mathematical epidemiology) presumes a material aspect to information. The question we can now ask, is what sorts of networks result when these apparently opposing views of contagion and transmission are layered on top of each other?

DSN, not DNS

In the past five years or so – and especially in the time since 9/11 – there have been a number of efforts to develop disease alert and response systems that would make use of information networks. The US CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) began a number of such projects in the 1990s, with acronyms such as LRN (Laboratory Response Network) and NEDSS (National Electronic Disease Surveillance System). [6] The impetus behind such programs was the alarming number of new and emerging infectious diseases being tracked nation-wide by the CDC, and internationally by the WHO (World Health Organization). In addition, the 1980s and 1990s saw a number of instances of biological sabotage (often by religious cults), both within the US and in other countries such as Japan. [7] Such events, combined with evidence suggesting a Soviet offensive bioweapons program in 1979, collectively made ‘biodefense’ an increasing concern of both public health and national security within the US. [8] It became evident that an information network like the Internet could be a crucial tool in enabling health officials to foresee potential outbreaks before they have a wide-spread effect on a population.

In recent years, two events in particular have given the need for such programs greater urgency. One is the 2001 anthrax attacks that occurred within the US, in which several letters containing a weaponised strain of anthrax in powdered form were sent through the US postal system to media and government offices in New York and Washington, DC. While the anthrax in the letters did not cause a nation-wide or state-wide epidemic, it did cause what one journalist called ‘mass disruption,’ triggering a state of public alarm through the elaborate media coverage given to the events. Undoubtedly the anthrax attacks were but one important factor behind the 2002 Bioterrorism Act, which, among other things, restricted the access to and research on approximately fifty ‘select biological agents’ – even within legitimate, university-based biology labs receiving government funding. The other event that has made the need for alert and response systems more urgent was the 2003 SARS epidemic. While SARS barely deserves the title of ‘epidemic’ in comparison to AIDS and tuberculosis worldwide, the condensed time span in which it spread from China to Canada made it a perfect case study for next-generation alert and response systems. In fact, it was, in part, thanks to the WHO’s ‘Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network’ that the spread of SARS was limited to the cities through which it traveled. [9] Coordinating among hospitals and clinics in infected areas in Beijing, Singapore, Toronto, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, and making use of a central server to upload and download patient data, the WHO was able to issue travel advisories and suggest countermeasures to the spread of SARS. In a sense, the WHO’s network provided a proof-of-concept that information networks could be effectively used in countering epidemic outbreaks.

This idea – the use of information networks to monitor, prevent, and counter-act epidemics – is called ‘biosurveillance’ by the US government. The systems that are used are variously referred to as ‘syndromic surveillance systems’ or ‘disease surveillance networks.’ For the sake of brevity, and following upon the penchant for acronyms in government agencies, we can broadly refer to them all as disease surveillance networks or simply ‘DSN’ (not to be confused with ‘DNS,’ or the ‘domain name system’ that hierarchically stratifies Internet server addresses). In the wake of 9/11, the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services has been especially active in promoting the need for a sophisticated, nation-wide DSN. Since the late 1990s, prototype DSNs have been active in multiple cities nationwide. [10] In early 2003, the Homeland Security ‘BioWatch’ program was tested in a number of American cities, with the cooperation of state and local governments. [11] The BioWatch system routinely took air samples to test for the presence of biological agents, and was connected to a network, through which it would send the data to be processed. This program became the forerunner of the US Biosurveillance program, which received a record-setting $274 million for the development of DSNs alone. The program aims to ‘enhance on-going surveillance programs in areas such as human health, hospital preparedness, state and local preparedness, vaccine research and procurement, animal health, food and agriculture safety and environmental monitoring, and integrate those efforts into one comprehensive system’ (US Department of Homeland Security, 2004). Proposals and projects surrounding DSNs are, as of this writing, growing at an exponential rate, and include projects underway both from the private sector as well as government-funded, university-based research.

Networks Fighting Networks

The existence and development of DSNs is noteworthy for a number of reasons. Chief among these is the way in which the DSNs integrates – or appears to integrate – the contrary views of contagion and transmission mentioned above (the view of ‘pathogenic information’ versus ‘informed pathogens,’ or information security versus mathematical epidemiology). The DSNs bring together the views of contagion and transmission into a single ‘artifactual’ system. On one view, ‘information’ is assumed to be immaterial (in that it is a unit of quantitative abstraction), but it operates through a biological process (in that the computer ‘virus’ has as its aim the infection of hosts and replication of itself). In other words, in the view of information security, biological process is abstracted from biological materiality, and is seen to inhabit the so-called immaterial domains of data and light.

This is countered by the other view, in which ‘information’ has to be material in order for an analysis to be accurate, or for a model to be effective. If there is no correspondence between an epidemic model and the actual epidemic, then epidemiology and public health have no ground on which to stand. Thus, even mathematical epidemic models are always forced to begin from empirical data. Yet, at the same time, there is ambiguity in this materiality of information. For, in the case of epidemiology, biological or medical information is understood both as a product of knowledge-based systems (e.g. medical records and disease statistics), and as a real ‘thing’ that spreads throughout a population (e.g. mutations in the RNA ‘code’ of a virus that enables it to evade medical therapies). In other words, in epidemiology – more specifically in its mathematical guises – informational processes are extracted from the particular media through which and across which information flows. These views intersect in the DSNs. Between the genetic code of a virus, the rate of epidemic growth, its demographic distribution, and the role of medical records, health insurance policies, and sales of pharmaceutical vaccines, there is an ambiguous continuum of informational processes that is informatic and yet thoroughly material.

One way of understanding this ambiguity with regards to DSNs is to return to the concept of the network. What is perhaps most striking about DSNs and the very idea of biosurveillance, is the way in which it positions one type of network (a computer network) against another type of network (a biological network). For many epidemiologists, the 2003 SARS epidemic has become a case study in this regard. The WHO’s outbreak network – which included network servers and software, as well as conferencing technologies – intentionally positioned itself as a network against the spread of the SARS coronavirus. During the outbreak, a Newsweek article (28 April 2003) summarized this view: ‘a 32-year-old Singaporean physician had attended a conference in New York and was on his way home—and he was exhibiting suspicious respiratory symptoms. Reports of cases in Canada and Singapore had recently made their way to Geneva; the predawn call made the situation all the more urgent. WHO officials tracked the man to a Singapore Airlines flight, due in Frankfurt at 9:30 that morning. By the time the plane touched down, quarantine specialists in goggles and jumpsuits were waiting to take the doctor and his two travel companions to an isolation ward.’ Such ‘preparedness and response’ actions involve not just technology, but also negotiations among WHO officials with governments and hospitals, from Toronto to Beijing. All these processes of information exchange and communications constituted part of the WHO’s counter-epidemic network.

The resultant effect is that of a real-time battle between networks: one, a biological network operating through infection, but abetted by the modern technologies of transportation; the other, an information network operating through communication, and facilitated by the rapid exchange of medical data between institutions. This is a situation of what we can call networks fighting networks, in which one type of network is positioned against another, and the opposing topologies made to confront each other’s respective strengths, robustness, and flexibilities. In their analyses of new modes of social organization and conflict, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt (2001) have pointed to the importance of the network paradigm. What they call ‘netwar’ reflects the contemporary integration of information technologies and network-based modes of political action, culminating in a Janus-faced dichotomy between pro-democracy activism on the one hand, and international terrorism on the other. As they state, ‘governments that want to defend against netwar may have to adopt organizational designs and strategies like those of their adversaries. This does not mean mirroring the adversary, but rather learning to draw on the same design principles that he has already learned about the rise of network forms in the information age’ (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2001: 15). The take-home message is that network forms of organization are highly resistant to top-down, centralized attempts to control and restrain them. Instead, the authors suggest that ‘it may take networks to fight networks’ (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2001: 327). In this case, biosurveillance and DSNs can be seen as initial attempts by governments to re-frame public health within the context of information technologies and national security. [12]

However there are a number of significant differences between what Arquilla and Ronfeldt call ‘netwar’ and the example of biosurveillance and DSNs. The majority of case studies that are considered under the rubric of ‘netwar’ – case studies which range from the Zapatista resistance, to the anti-WTO protests in Seattle and Geneva, to al-Qaeda – imply human action and decision-making as a core part of the network’s organization. In fact, one limit of the netwar approach is that it does not push the analysis far enough, to consider the uncanny, ‘nonhuman’ characteristics of such networks. In a sense, the interest in the study of network forms of organization is exactly in their decentralized, or even distributed mode of existing – and for this reason research in biological self-organization often provide a reference point for netwar analysis (e.g. in studies of crowd behavior, flocking, or swarming). Yet, as many studies make clear, the result of netwar analysis is, ultimately, to gain a better instrumental knowledge of the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of network forms of organization (that many netwar studies have come out of the RAND think-tank environment is indicative in this regard). In other words, approaches to studying networks seem to be caught between the views of control and emergence with respect to networks as dynamic, living entities. On the one hand, networks are intrinsically of interest because the basic principles of their functioning (e.g. local actions, global patterns) reveal a mode of living organization that is not and cannot be dependent on a top-down, ‘centralized’ mindset. Yet, for all the idealistic, neoliberal visions of ‘open networks’ or ‘webs without spiders,’ there is always an instrumental interest that underlies the study of networks, either to better build them, to make them more secure, or to deploy them in confronting other network adversaries or threats. At the same time that there is an interest in better controlling and managing networks, there is also an interest in their uncontrollable and unmanageable character.

Indeterminate Control

The challenges put forth in this tension between ‘control’ and ‘emergence’ are not just technical problems, but are challenges that raise ontological as well as political questions. From the network perspective, case studies like the 2003 SARS epidemic look very much like a centralized information network counter-acting a decentralized biological network. The WHO’s outbreak response network coordinated the exchange of data through network servers and conference calls, and health advisories could then radiate from this central node. By contrast, SARS infection was maximized by moving through the highly-connected nodes of airports and hotels. The strategy of DSNs, then, is to canalize transmission in order to fight the decentralization of contagion. If an epidemic is ‘successful’ at its goals of replication and spread, then it gradually becomes a distributed network, in which any node of the network may infect any other node. [13]

Health officials warned in late 2003 that the SARS virus may very well make occasional re-appearances during the cold and flu season, implying that new and emerging infectious diseases are less one-off events, and more of an ongoing milieu. By definition, if a network topology is decentralized or distributed, it is highly unlikely that the network can be totally shut down or quarantined: there will always be a tangential link, a stray node (a ‘line of flight’?) that will ensure the minimal possibility of the network’s survival. This logic was, during the Cold War, built into the design of the ARPAnet, and, if we accept the findings of network science, it is also built into the dynamics of epidemics as well. While the idea of totally distributed networks and ‘open networks’ have become slogans for the peer-to-peer and open source cultures, the hybrid quality of DSNs and biosurveillance (at once material and immaterial, contagion and transmission) reveal the frustratingly oppressive aspects of decentralization. Furthermore, the network organization of epidemics are, as we’ve noted, much more than a matter of biological infection; epidemic networks of infection are densely layered with networks of transportation, communication, political negotiation, and the economics of health care.

In DSNs, the tension between ‘control’ and ‘emergence’ points to the ‘nonhuman’ character of networks. DSNs are nonhuman networks, not because the human element is removed from them and replaced by computers, but precisely because human action and decision-making form constituent parts of the network. This point is worth pausing on. Despite the technophilic quality of many biosurveillance projects, their most interesting network properties come not from the ‘automated detection systems,’ but from the ways in which a multiplicity of human agencies produces a intentional yet indeterminate aggregate effect. While much time and money is spent on computer systems to model and forecast epidemic spread, such systems are always ‘best guesses.’ The same is implied in the human involvement – autonomous and conscious – in the epidemics that biosurveillance aims to prevent. As we’ve noted, the layered quality of networks (infection, transportation, communication) gives each particular epidemic incident a singularity that frustrates any sort of reductive, quantitative modeling. In short, for biosurveillance the challenge for the network management of an epidemic is how to articulate control within emergence. The nearly paradoxical question posed by biosurveillance with regards to epidemics is this: is it possible to construct a network for articulating intention within indeterminacy?

Let us rephrase the situation of biosurveillance in plain terms, to make the political issues at stake clearer. An epidemic is underway. An agency – the CDC for example – must develop and deploy a strategy for containing the epidemic. Because epidemics are understood to be network forms of organization, any attempts to contain and eradicate the epidemic must similarly use a network approach. Thus, one network – that of the CDC’s NEDSS – must counteract another network – that of the disease. We thus have an instance of ‘networks fighting networks.’ However the two networks are not simply mirror images of each other. The CDC’s network is a centralized network that makes use of information technologies, while the epidemic is a more decentralized combination of biological, technological (e.g. air travel), and other types of networks. To prevent the latter network from becoming more diffuse, the former network becomes more canalized, or rather, more selective. Thus, the main challenge put forth to the first network (the CDC) is how to intervene in, perturb, and shape the topology of the second network (the disease). Meeting this challenge means, then, deciding on the exceptional instances in which intervention and action is warranted. Intervention itself is not so much the issue; rather, it is the decision on intervention that is at stake.

Network Exception

We can summarize this even further: the challenge of biosurveillance is the challenge of establishing sovereignty within a network. As a political and juridical term, the concept of sovereignty is already defined by paradox. As Giorgio Agamben (1998) notes, the defining feature of modern sovereignty is not that it is the power to execute the law, but that it is the capacity to claim the exception to the rule. ‘I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law’ (Agamben, 1998: 15). Agamben’s dense and thought-provoking analysis suggests that, when sovereignty establishes itself in this way (as the exception to the rule), it necessarily produces its other in the figure of ‘homo sacer,’ or the ‘bare life’ that is outside both the political and social orders (‘life that can be killed and yet not sacrificed’). Sovereignty’s own injunction is to be at once outside and inside the juridical-political order, at once legitimized through law, and yet capable of deciding when the law should be suspended. What is captured in this no-man’s-land is ‘bare life,’ life that is outside of the political order, and yet, by being abandoned in this way, is also inscribed within it. The radicalism of Agamben’s proposal is that this logic is common to both the totalitarianism of National Socialist medicine, as well as to the discourse of ‘human rights’ that emerged in the post-war era. [14] Both the claim to protect the population from hereditary disease, and the claim that human beings, by the fact of being alive, have inalienable rights, draw upon the ‘zone of indistinction’ between sovereignty and ‘bare life.’ Whenever ‘bare life’ or ‘life itself’ is at stake, the population or body politic is also at stake, legitimizing emergency measures, or the declaration of a ‘state of exception.’ In this way, sovereignty makes itself known at the very point at which ‘bare life’ comes under threat, in the state of emergency or state of exception. As both Agamben and Foucault note, this sovereign decision on ‘life itself’ is also often a decision on ‘death itself.’ When the state of exception is in effect, then the defense of the ‘life itself’ of the population depends on a range of exceptional measures or actions taken, actions which often have ambivalent effects.

No other ‘state of exception’ is quite as exceptional as an epidemic – except perhaps war. In fact, the most powerful state of exception is one that is not recognized as such. The sovereign exception obtains its most intense level of legitimation in an environment in which the exception is the rule – that is, a situation in which ‘exception’ is directly correlated to a ‘threat’ that is, by definition, indeterminate. In this regard nothing is more exceptional than the inability to distinguish between epidemic and war, between emerging infectious disease and bioterrorism. Although, wars have the benefit of being waged by individual and collective human agents, humans fighting humans. Epidemics ignite public fears with great ease, in part because the ‘enemy’ is often undetected, and therefore potentially everywhere. But more than this, it is the alien, nonhuman character of epidemics that incite public anxiety – there is no intentionality, no rationale, no aim except to carry out iterations of what we understand to be simple rules (infect, replicate, infect, replicate…). The exceptions of epidemics and war implode in biological warfare, bioterrorism, and in the way that US policy enframes the public health response to infectious disease. In the US, the rubric ‘biodefense’ – which is increasingly taking on epidemic proportions itself – has come to incorporate within itself what was, at least on an institutional level, the non-defense concerns of public health. A recent White House press release states that ‘the [US] President believes that, by bringing researchers, medical experts, and the biomedical industry together in a new and focused way, our Nation can achieve the same kind of treatment breakthroughs for bioterrorism and other threats that have significantly reduced the threat of heart disease, cancer, and many other serious illnesses’ (White House, 2003).

The ‘biopolitical’ analyses of sovereignty by Agamben and Foucault become more complicated with biosurveillance and DSNs. This is because of the way in which biosurveillance ambiguously integrates the informatic and biological views of epidemics, producing an implosion between the immaterial and material, model and object, concept and entity. But the situation regarding sovereignty is also more complicated because of the network properties of DSNs and the epidemics they are designed to combat. In a sense, biosurveillance and DSNs are emblematic of the challenge facing many network forms of organization today – the challenge of the role of sovereignty within networks (or what Negri refers to as the ‘political problem of the decision’ in the multitude). To posit the need for network strategies to fight network threats is one thing, but it is quite another to place such strategies within governmental and institutional structures that are anything but distributed. The overarching goal of the DSNs becomes suddenly ensnared in the multiple agencies and interests involved in the network. This problem can already be witnessed in current US biodefense policies and practices. While no one will deny that bioterrorism does present a significant threat today, the DSNs that have been deployed and that are currently in development have raised a whole host of ethical and political issues: the confidentiality regarding a patient’s medical records, the impact of biosurveillance on public health care systems (most notably health insurance), the question of mandated or voluntary reporting of medical data by physicians, and finally the concern of designing secure information networks dedicated to DSNs – this last issue being particularly interesting, since it posits a scenario in which a computer ‘virus’ may disable the capacity to stop a biological virus. [15]

When networks fight networks, the characteristic political response has been to rely upon the structure of sovereignty to intervene in and define the topology of the networks. The collection of information by Homeland Security officials is predicated on the sovereign ‘state of exception,’ and this same logic is being carried over into the information networks that underlie the various DSNs that are part of the US biosurveillance endeavor. We have, with DSNs, not just the use of new tools for the same old job, but rather the construction of exceptional topologies, in the sense of an ongoing ‘state of exception,’ preparedness, and readiness for a threat that is, by definition, immanent to the network itself. As an NEDSS fact sheet notes, ‘the long-term vision of NEDSS is that of complementary electronic information systems that automatically gather health data from a variety of sources on a real-time basis; facilitate the monitoring of the health of communities; assist in the ongoing analysis of trends and detection of emerging public health problems; and provide information for setting public health policy’ (NEDSS, 2000). The WHO’s response to SARS is another exceptional topology, a hybrid of computers, communications, hospitals, health advisories, and what the US calls ‘medical countermeasures’ such as quarantine and travel restriction.

Again, in order to grasp what is at stake ontologically, it is important to resist a simple moral understanding of DSNs, as if the mere fact of surveillance in itself is a ‘bad’ thing, a sign of the further ‘medicalisation’ of society. The demonstrated success of the WHO’s network makes such condemnations difficult. And yet, without a doubt, biosurveillance programs such as those in the US are in the process of casting the ‘medical gaze’ further than it has ever been cast before. This is why biosurveillance has to be regarded as a topological problem as well as a political problem. DSNs are caught between the recognition of the need to fight networks with networks, and the insistent need to establish sovereignty within the network. For this reason, we may see the situation of ‘networks fighting networks’ become the rule rather than the exception. In the condition of a normative state of exception, they may remain continually operative, but relatively invisible in terms of its effects. Until, of course, a threat is identified, at which time the network topology may undergo a sudden, even violent contraction (bioterror alerts, seizure of materials, detention of individuals, Haz-Mat inspections).

Political Vitalism

This sovereignty of ‘exceptional topologies’ – the mode of sovereignty specific to networks – is currently having a number of concrete effects in shaping US biosurveillance and biodefense policies. One is that there is no longer any strict division between ‘naturally-occurring’ infectious diseases and what the CDC calls ‘intentional epidemics’ (bioterrorism). In a sense, biosurveillance has surpassed even the most avant-garde cultural theory, disregarding the traditional divisions between nature and culture. If their causes are different, from the point of view of ‘security,’ their effects are the same. (And indeed one of the fearful aspects of bioterrorism is the unknown and indeterminate impact of an artificially-induced, or worse, genetically-engineered epidemic.) If epidemics and bioterrorism are, from the biopolitical perspective of ‘security,’ the same, then it follows that medical practice and health care systems will increasingly be called upon to participate in the concerns of national security and defense. This is not unique to biosurveillance programs today, however. The history of epidemiology, statistics, and demography reveals a long-standing, implicit collaboration between medicine and government (of which the idea of ‘public health’ is but one result). [16] Furthermore, military research programs in the US and other Western nations have, at least since World War II (and, arguably, after the first biological sabotage programs in World War I), made biology and medicine part of defense. [17] What is unique about contemporary biosurveillance is the unofficial and vague incorporation of medicine into national security. Such vagueness comes out in the concerns over the degree to which physicians, nurses, and health practitioners may in the future become obligated by law to report specific types of medical information.

A blurring of distinctions, then, is one effect of the ambiguousness regarding control versus emergence in biosurveillance. The ‘complex’ and ‘emergent’ properties of networks, be they biological or otherwise, serves as the rationale for a technically-sophisticated surveillance system that has, as its long-term goal, the total integration with federal and local healthcare infrastructures. Yet this immanence of biosurveillance has a flip-side, which is the language of ‘threat’, ’security,’ and ‘defense,’ a language of networks fighting networks that necessitates exceptional measures to intervene in and shape networks. On the one hand, the DSNs will be invisible and immanent, part and parcel of medical practice and public health. On the other hand, that same DSNs may, in times of crisis or a state of emergency, become suddenly contracted and highly centralized. What this masks, of course, is the way in which the DSNs are always in a continual state of emergency. ‘Preparedness’ simply becomes actualized in ‘emergency,’ both of which are predicated on the sovereign exception acting within a network.

The challenge to epidemiology and public health, then, is to confront the paradoxical claim that ‘networks are needed to fight networks.’ In other words, the study of epidemics, and the application in biosurveillance and in DSNs, presents us with a situation in which the need for control is also, in some way, the need for an absence of control (‘emergence,’ ‘self-organization,’ and so forth). An approach that concentrates on eradicating the ‘disease itself’ through vaccination will only ever follow the epidemic. Thus, the search for the ‘disease itself’ will only result in finding the disease everywhere in general, but nowhere in particular. And yet, any attempt to design preventive systems inevitably implies the design of preemptive systems, and the acceptance of the ambiguous politics associated with the doctrine of preemption. In this regard, Agamben’s (1998) comment that ‘biopolitics necessarily turns into thanatopolitics’ takes on a new meaning.

DSNs such as those of the WHO, the CDC’s NEDSS, and Homeland Security’s BioWatch system, are all examples of attempts to use networks to fight networks. In many cases, as we’ve seen, the strategy is to deploy a centralized information network to counteract the decentralized (or ‘becoming-distributed’) network of an epidemic. However, what often goes unrecognized is that the effectiveness of the WHO’s network may not be due to the technical existence and deployment of information technologies, but to the degree to which the WHO’s health advisories were carried out at local levels – that is, ‘downstream’ from the central node, at the sparsely-connected peripheries of the network. In many cities, including Singapore (where health ‘kits’ were made available to civilians), the transmission of knowledge about the contagion was key to preventing further epidemic spread. This depended not upon WHO or state officials, but, ultimately, on the more ‘horizontal’ interactions between local agencies (clinics, physicians, nurses, educators, volunteers). Again, the point is not to seek to idealize the inherently liberal principles of decentralized or distributed networks, but to notice the following: the situation of ‘networks fighting networks’ puts forth a challenge to us to rethink traditional notions of ‘control’, ‘decision,’ and ‘action,’ or what these terms may mean in a given network-based context.

Can we imagine a situation in which both networks are decentralized, or even distributed? Would this be a desirable thing, or would it signal a greater fatality for our intention to manage and control an epidemic? It is not difficult to imagine a range of possible scenarios based on the current political climate. One is a scenario in which a real-time DSN is established on its own dedicated Internet, on which it runs automatically, without human intervention. This is, in a sense, the biomedical equivalent to the computerized command-and-control weapons systems of the Cold War. Despite the science fictional overtones, the automation of DSNs occupies a significant portion of the research, and at least one automated system – the RODS or Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance system – was implemented at the 2002 Olympic Games in Utah. [18] Another imaginary scenario comes, interestingly enough, from computer science. In 2003, when the ‘Blaster’ virus made its way through the Internet, an attempt was made to design a software ‘vaccine’ to Blaster, or a ‘good virus.’ [19] Dubbed ‘Naachi,’ this ‘good virus’ would travel through the Internet, checking computers to see if they were vulnerable to the particular type of attack that the Blaster virus used. If a computer was found to be vulnerable, Naachi would automatically download a patch from the Microsoft website (Blaster only infected PCs running Windows). All this network activity would be happening in the background, with the computer user only half-aware of what was taking place. Unfortunately, due to excessive Internet traffic to and from the Microsoft website, Naachi caused more damage than it prevented, clogging several commercial airline and Navy computer systems. But it is not difficult to imagine the ‘good virus’ example carried over into biodefense. The prospect is harrowing: from a strictly network perspective, wouldn’t the best network counter-offensive be a benign virus, one that would inhabit the very air we breathe, vaccinating us against a potential threat that we did not know existed? And, if the best way to fight networks is with networks, then wouldn’t this necessitate a de-emphasis on human-centered action, and an increased emphasis on the ‘vital’ properties of the network in itself? In such an instance, would it still be possible to distinguish contagion from transmission?

Author’s Biography

Eugene Thacker is Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech. He has written extensively on the relationships between biology, informatics, and politics, and is the author of two books: Biomedia (University of Minnesota, 2004) and The Global Genome (MIT, 2005).

Notes

[1] See Rosen, 1993, pp. 251-63.

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[2] See Porter, 1997, 236-37.

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[3] See Foucault, 2000, pp. 134-56.

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[4] See Porter, 1997, pp. 412-14. Also see Snow’s pamphlet On the Mode of Communication in Cholera, published during the 1849 outbreak in London.

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[5] The SIR model measures the probability that a disease will become epidemic for a particular population. Individuals within a population are characterized a ‘susceptible’ (vulnerable to infection), ‘infected’ (capable of infecting others), or ‘recovered’ (either through acquired immunity, medical intervention, or possibly death). The threshold of epidemicity is when the overall transition from ‘susceptible’ to ‘infected’ is greater than the transition from ‘infected’ to ‘removed.’ For a description of the SIR model in epidemiology, see Watts, 2003, pp. 168-74.

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[6] Information about these and other CDC-based surveillance projects can be obtained online at http://www.cdc.gov.

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[7] See Miller et al., 2002, pp. 15-33, 151-54, 160-63.

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[8] See Alibek and Handelman, 1999, and Miller et al., 2002, pp. 135-37.

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[9] For more on the WHO’s ‘Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network’ go to http://www.who.int.

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[10] See the 2000 CDC report “Preventing Emerging Infectious Diseases: A Strategy for the 21st Century,” available online at: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/emergplan/

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[11] For an example, see Hoffman et al., 2003.

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[12] However networks do not always fight other networks; in many cases the networks can be ‘layered’ on top of each other to produce an intensification, or a ‘network affect.’ In the case of the 2001 anthrax attacks in the US, for instance, a minimally-effective biological network was abetted by two ‘layers’ of information networks: that of the postal system, and that of the mass media. Through this network layering, the actual infection of a small number of individuals had the impact of an epidemic (indeed the threat posed by the anthrax attacks were the primary motive behind the US Bioterrorism Act). In this case, qualitatively different information networks were able to amplify the limited effect of a biological agent. In other words, the layering of different types of networks enabled an overall network amplification to occur.

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[13] Thus, the most ‘successful’ epidemic is one that is virtual with respect to any actual node on the network.

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[14] See Agamben, 1998, pp. 126-35.

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[15] On these and other issues, see the special issue of JAMIA (Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association), 9.2 (2002), on “The Role of Informatics in Preparedness for Bioterrorism and Disaster.”

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[16] See Porter, 1997, pp. 397-427.

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[17] See Harris and Paxman, 1982, and Miller et al. 2002, pp. 38-41.

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[18] See Gesteland et al., 2003.

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[19] For a brief summary, see the article “Attack of the World Wide Worms,” Time (1 September 2003): 48-50.

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References

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Alibek, Ken and Stephen Handelman. Biohazard (New York: Random House, 1999).

Arquilla, John, and David Ronfeldt, eds. Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (Santa Monica: RAND, 2001).

Barabási, Albert-László. Linked: The New Science of Networks (Cambridge: Perseus, 2002).

Barabási, Albert-László, and Zoltán Dezso. “Halting Viruses in Scale-Free Networks,” Physical Review E 65 (21 May 2002): 1-5.

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Séan Hand. London: Continuum, 1999 [1986].

Forrest, Stephanie, Steven Hofmeyr, and Anil Somayaji. “Computer Immunology,” Communications of the ACM (21 March 1996).

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage, 1973).

—-. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979).

—-. Power. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000).

Gesteland, P.H. et al. “Implementing Automated Syndromic Surveillance for the 2002 Winter Olympics.” JAMIA (Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association) 10.6 (Nov/Dec 2003): 547-554.

Hacking, Ian. “Bio-power and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers.” Humanities in Society 5 (1982): 279-95.

Harris, Robert, and Jeremy Paxman. A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Biological and Chemical Warfare (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982).

Hoffman, Mark, et al. “Multijurisdictional Approach to Biosurveillance, Kansas City.” Emerging Infectious Disease 9.10 (October 2003): 1281-86.

Kephart, Jeffrey, David Chess, and Steve White. “Computer Viruses and Epidemiology,” IEEE Spectrum 30.5 (May 1993): 20-26.

Miller, Judith, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad. Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War (New York: Touchstone, 2002).

NEDSS. “Supporting Public Health Surveillance through the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS),” fact sheet, 2000. Available from: http://www.cdc.gov/od/hissb/docs.htm#nedss.

Porter, Roy. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: Norton, 1997).

Rosen, George. A History of Public Health (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993 [1958]).

Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1965).

U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “President’s Budget Include $274 Million to Further Improve Nation’s Bio-Surveillance Capabilities,” press release (29 January 2004).

Watts, Duncan. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (New York: Norton, 2003).

White House, Office of the Press Secretary. “President Details Project BioShield,” press release (3 February 2003).

This issue of Fibreculture Journal, dedicated as it is to an exploration of the matter of contagion and the diseases of information, may be usefully read in the context of the political, ethical and theoretical problem of resistance, such as it was outlined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in 1991. Indeed, the connection which Deleuze and Guattari make – between an excess of communication and a lack of resistance – suggests very strongly the possibility of an epidemiological determination of contemporary politics, and this in a number of senses.

As is well known, contagious disease thrives amongst populations characterised by a great deal of contact and little resistance, which is why school playgrounds, the workplace and battlefields have traditionally provided the perfect milieux for the propagation of common infections. But more pointedly, as Marc Guillaume has pointed out, the term ‘epidemic’ itself derives from two Ancient Greek terms which combine to mean ‘against the people’ (Guillaume, 1987).

The characterisation of our present conjuncture as a biopolitical one, taking in hand the health of the population, does not provide the only reason for considering that disease and contagion may figure as crucial (if somewhat indeterminate) factors in the problem of resistance. Biological, vital forces work in a relationship of unstable alliance with social and cultural forces which is often overlooked by the more anthropocentric of interpretations of history. This in turn implies that infection and its variants have a material, ecological function which traverse the nature-culture divide, disclosing the existence of an abstract dynamic which can be and has been accomplished by other kinds of agents than viruses, bacteria, prions and so on. In so far as the dynamic disclosed by contagion and disease is always a dynamic of communication there is no reason to limit its operation purely to the domain of the biological. Nietzsche, speaking of humans as a skin disease of the earth (Nietzsche, 1961), or of the ‘bacillus of revenge’ (Nietzsche, 1968) was not being metaphorical.

For the same reason, if it is true to say that ‘looked at from the point of view of other organisms, humankind … resembles an acute epidemic disease, whose occasional lapses into less virulent forms of behaviour have never yet sufficed to permit any really stable chronic behaviour to establish itself’ (McNeill, 1977: 41-2), then the concept of ecological imperialism (Crosby, 1986) is a valid one, power is disease and disease, sometimes, power. Isabelle Stengers is right to draw a link between Foucault’s conception of power and a conception of infection she attributes to Whitehead: ‘All “social power”, if it is not purely and simply repressive (a rare and unstable case) primarily designates a dynamic of infection’ (Stengers, 2002: 186).

The historical evidence sifted by biogeographers, natural historians and others of their ilk gives us plenty of reasons to want to re-evaluate the relationship between disease and culture, the nature of propagation and the extent of the dynamics of infection. But so do more contemporary phenomena. The shifting ecology of today’s media, with the spectacular visibility of the computer virus and its congenerates: worms, trojans and the like testifies to a functioning of computer code which taps into the abstract dynamics of infection and infectious entities. Marketing experts trumpet the virtues of viral marketing. Within the human sciences, the discipline of social psychology, covetous perhaps of the cultural ascendence of neo-Darwinian approaches in the life sciences, has resurrected the crowd psychology of the late nineteenth century and, in the guise of memetics or ‘thought contagion’ (Lynch 1996), proposes the meme as basic unit of transmission for cultural forms which themselves assume an epidemic quality. Such research may well be articulated around a somewhat hysterical agenda, but this does not mean that the phenomena it investigates are null. William Burroughs had already concluded that the word is a virus long before Dawkins developed the notion of the meme. If nothing else, the existence of memetics is a reminder of the existence of multiple, collective dynamics of communication which remain poorly understood.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have claimed (in Empire) that the age of globalisation is the age of ‘universal contagion’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 136). Whilst such a statement may smack a little of rhetorical overload (after all, if everyone is infected, a contagion simply burns itself out), it does capture something of the dynamics and the danger which resistance to the present require, a becoming-microbe perhaps. It has been argued that more than any other factor it was the plague of Athens which brought about the decline of Greece, that Genghis Khan and his mongol hordes, in their incessant movements between Europe and Asia rendered the continent permeable to the eventual transmission of the plague, and that influenza and other humble endemic infections were responsible for the decimation of millions upon millions of Amerindians subsequent to the discovery of the New World by Columbus. People living under the conditions of an epidemic are, according to Canetti ‘like participants in a battle which lasts longer than all known battles. But the enemy is hidden; he is nowhere to be seen and cannot be hit. One can only wait to be hit by him’ (Canetti, 1962: 319).

However before this editorial introduction bursts out in a rash, there are a number of cautionary remarks that need to be made:

1. Whilst epidemics may well have the most vivid impact on the imagination, possessing something of a spectacular quality: ‘in an epidemic, people see the advance of death; it takes place under their very eyes’ (Canetti, 1962: 319), it is important, both politically and ethically, not to overlook the endemic quality of many diseases. Cortez’s Spanish troops had acquired immunity to the infections which were so lethal to the Indians because these infections were largely endemic ones – the sort of irritating, occasionally dangerous background noise usually acquired in childhood and to which the organism evolves an adequate response. Endemic communication is dangerous under conditions of rapid deterritorialisation, as McNeill’s work shows. Email fever.

2. As with power for Foucault, infection and contagion operate on a reticular, network basis. Small worlds theory in physics and the science of networks purport to formalise the operations of this sort of logic, the better to exploit them perhaps, but as Eugene Thacker points out in his essay, Living Dead Networks, the network operation of power raises the problem, in all likelihood unsolvable in any enduring, stable way, of establishing sovereignty in the network, a problem which emerges with networks fighting networks. That the problem is insoluble is no cause for complacency, for as Thacker wittily points out, the zombie – created at the point where biological contagion, information transmission and the technologies of control they solicit crossover – figures the disturbing consequences of the difficulty for epidemiology of distinguishing contagion and transmission.

3. The predator-prey relationship which biologists use to characterise life and its a-morality and which is particularly, if painfully evident in disease phenomena, is complex, relative and unstable, especially in environments characterised by a rapidly changing ecology. The problem is exacerbated in technical environments whose rapid development robs them of the relative stability that millions of years of co-evolution presents. Jussi Parikka’s essay Digital Monsters, Binary Aliens demonstrates the fundamental instability of this relationship in an examination of the cultural history of the computer virus in its relation to capitalism.

4. It is difficult to assign any definite axiology to disease. This is partly because of the complexity of the predator-prey relationship. Nietzsche’s genius has been attributed, correctly or not (exactly which is immaterial), to his catching syphilis. Small doses of a bacillus confer immunity. However, lifting the axiological ‘prejudice’ is a delicate task: Roberta Buiani, in her essay Marginal Networks uses an analytic framework inspired by Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge to investigate the discursive formation within which the virus appears. Carefully deconstructing the totalising pretentions of that framework, she points towards ways in which the negativity it entails may be surmounted.

5. There is a big difference between adapting contagion and disease as ontologically neutral conceptual operators and aping the life sciences. For memetics culture reduces down to basic units, the meme as a sort of atom of culture. But to capture the sort of transversal dynamic which contagion exemplifies requires an approach which can think relationally. For Michel Serres, the parasite, as an operator of the sort advocated here, is a relational term, the introducer of disymmetry, turbulence, the irreversible and perhaps – although he doesn’t say so – rhythm (Serres 1982). It is the constant waves of disease which wear down a population, just as it is waves of affect which carry it away. Stamatia Portanova’s essay Rhythmic Parasites explores the contagious force of rhythm in the spreading of particular forms of dance. For Portanova, rhythm operates on its own plane, cutting across the biological, the cultural and the technological, according to a logic of ‘viral diffusion’. Her paper shows quite clearly the irrelevance of maintaining the firm distinction between microscopic and macroscopic orders of reality which one might be accustomed to thinking characteristic of the distinction between biological and cultural forms of life.

Despite their very clear differences, the papers collected in this issue of Fibreculture Journal provide a highly suggestive exploration of the phenomena of contagion and the diseases of information. I would like to thank the authors for the work that they have put in, for their patience in responding to my slow-witted editorial questions and for the thoughtful responses they have provided to the theme of the issue. I would also like to thank Andrew Murphie and Lisa Gye for having tolerated the evolutionary creep of this issue towards completion.

Biography

Andrew Goffey is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications and Culture at Middlesex University, England. He writes on issues concerning the relationship between philosophy, culture and society and his work has appeared in Radical Philosophy, The Journal for Cultural Research, Mediactive and M/C Journal. He is currently researching a book exploring some of the relations between the life sciences, technology and culture.

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