/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Tony D. Sampson + Jussi Parikka

In a recent article published in the French journal AOC, we make some observations about what we call ‘the viral patterning of Covid-19’.[1] Our approach is supported by a concept we call the universal media virus. This concept brings into relation a plurality of contagious patternings and viral loops, traversing biological, economic, cultural, technological, social and political contexts. In this edited version of that article, we focus on a few of our concluding remarks that seem pertinent to considering what it means, in the wake of Covid-19, to live a sensible life. As this special edition posits, the ‘architecture of the Lockdown’ has dramatically increased our dependence on digital virtuality. There is a possibility that the felt corporeality of our bodies will become alienated as our sensibilities shift to online worlds and soulless platforms like Zoom. In many ways, then, it might also be suggested that these architectures of spatial quarantine and confinement have made us ever more prone to threats posed by virtual contagions. Many of us would have already seen those catching Instagram images of empty supermarket shelves. Likewise, digital virtuality seems to be the perfect medium for spreading conspiracy theories, like those seemingly insane rumours that blame the Covid-19 virus on the rollout of 5G networks.

Before Covid-19, the universality of contagion was often grasped as an analogue of the biological virus. However, after Covid-19, it’s difficult to imagine living life through mere metaphors or indeed via representations of any kind of alien biological context. The virus itself has indeed had a negative influence on the desire for a sensible life, insofar as Covid-19 apparently infects the olfactory gland, resulting in a lockdown of a person’s sense of smell and taste. Life is certainly not, at this moment, simply like a virus. On the contrary, Covid-19 presents us with a series of nested viral loops in which to live, wherein the biological becomes interwoven with the algorithmic churn of panic buying, conspiracy theory and financial meltdown. These viral loops are furtheriian nested in the politics of epidemiological science; in between community herding, lockdown, confinement, the distancing of bodies, testing, immunity passports and desires for inoculation. In short, however much we might try to imagine what a sensible life will be like in these soulless virtual spaces, right now, all we can really do is live this viral life.

As a conceptual tool to understand our new reality, the universal media virus breaks from established media theory analysis of contagion couched in metaphorical, figurative and analogical modes of the imagination. These modes have misleadingly gifted us two kinds of media virus. The first provides a celebration of participatory media culture based on a notion of information as analogous to a biological virus. The second is the Neo-Darwinist meme, founded on the popular meme/gene analogy. On one hand, then, the universal virus challenges an early metaphorical model of media contagion dating back to the 1990s. The information-virus thesis proposes that digital media can be harnessed and manipulated by a newly empowered user. Alongside the comparable concept of spreadable media, the information-virus perceptively tested the assumed entrenchments of the old ideological state apparatus model of media, pointing toward a novel McLuhanesque participatory culture. However, we can, perhaps, in retrospect, trace the celebratory nature of this viral logics all the way to the fantasy of revolutionary social media contagions during the Arab Spring. On the other hand, the universal virus intervenes in a second media virus concept that appeared in the early noughties. The memetic virus was extracted from a few loose remarks made in the latter pages of Richard Dawkins’s neo-Darwinian Selfish Gene thesis of 1976. In Susan Blackmore’s neo-Darwinian Meme Machine, for example, we find a media virus which functions analogically according to an evolutionary algorithm. The logics of the neo-Darwinian meme emerged in various millennial discourses, mostly those associated with the rhetoric of viral marketing and the computer viruses/antivirus arms race. As some overenthusiastic viral marketers claimed, contagion may seem accidental, but the pass-on-power of a media message could be memetically encoded (and harnessed) to spread as determined.

The universal virus rejects biological or technological determinism in favour of a transversal contagion. In short, no one mechanism determines contagion since the relationality and accidentality of the viral event supersedes deterministic thinking. Contagious behaviours are not solely predetermined by an informational or evolutionary code, as such. The universal virus relates instead to a complex array of unknown unknowns triggered by environmental interactions. Indeed, the vectors of contagion, and any subsequent security response to these environmental conditions, will prove to be effective only after the fact. These are paradoxical viral environments in which the mode of future predictions, based on existing models and reliant on historical data and assumptions, becomes at odds with the necessary open-ended nature of a shared communication network.

Of course, the story of contagion modelling – either as epidemiological modelling or as conceptualising theoretical models – is not reducible to contemporary network culture. To better grasp the bizarre nature of the kinds of contagious loops we are experiencing with Covid-19, the universal virus makes further significant references to nineteenth century contagion theory. Most notably the concept borrows from Gabriel Tarde’s society of imitation thesis, which, like Paul Virilio, focuses on the accidents of mechanism, rather than a mechanism’s logic. Moreover, Tarde’s imitative social subjects are not the victims, but rather the products of contagion. It is, indeed, in the accidental relations of contagion, that Tarde’s subjects are continuously made and remade.

Like the inexplicable behaviours of crazed shoppers panic buying toilet rolls in recent weeks, the subjectivities that are produced in Tarde’s society of imitation are conspicuously rendered docile sleepwalkers. His thesis followed a general trend in crowd theories of the time that judged individuals as logical beings, until that is, they become immersed in the illogical mentality of the mob. However, Tarde’s many references to social somnambulism must not be misconstrued as an understanding of society founded entirely on collective stupidity. His work is more nuanced than say Gustave Le Bon’s cruder popular psychology of the crowd. Importantly, Tarde’s references to sleepwalking were informed by the absence of a distinction he made between a biological nonconscious inclination and sociocultural tendencies to imitate. In other words, Tarde’s social subjects, including those that were supposed to be making rational economic judgements, are never self-contained. They are both, simultaneously, etched by the affect of others and leaking their own infectious affects. Again, following the logic of the universal virus, recent outbreaks of panic buying, crazy rumours and seemingly irrational market trading, are examples of further unpredictable automations of bodies and habits that can occur online.

Furthermore, universal viruses are not myths that cover up an underlying ideological reality. Following the Covid-19 outbreak, the universal virus can certainly no longer be considered as a conjured-up fantasy, projection, or for that matter, in the current context, a crude biopolitical invention strategically placed to justify measures of containment. Although, for sure, there are multiple levels of political aims at play, not least in terms of the recurring question of immunological borders, the logic of this virus is now, for the time being, the overriding power dynamic. Far from providing a convenient allegory for action, the very real viral event of Covid-19 is currently producing its own reality according to which our habits and worlds must bend and adapt.

Universal viruses are nonrepresentational in the sense that they make their own physical and metaphysical infrastructures of connectivity, while exposing the underlying social strata upon which – as epi–demos – they function. Along these lines, the legal theorist Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos contends that Covid-19 presents a Spinozian contagion in terms of how bodies relate to each other and their environment. The “challenge of Covid” is, he argues, “monumentally ethical.” This is because the virus “demands of us to accept a quintessentially Spinozan ethics of positioning, of emplacing one’s body in a geography of awareness of how affects circulate between us and others.”[2] This viral patterning of habit and behaviour is no longer merely a question of homophilic identification (connecting to friends, friends of friends, parents, etc.), but radically expands to modes of connection and disconnection co-determined by collective bodies that are being positioned in relation to each other, to space, to borders, to containment, etc.

The viral patterning of Covid-19 will continue to spur a range of actions, habits, behaviours and affects that might take a hold of bodies in more predictable or previously unimagined ways. Certainly, some of the pegs that fix the future of biopolitical movements of people and messages will no doubt produce more docile sleepwalkers. It is not surprising that the UK government initially opted for a neoliberal version of herd immunity in which collective obligation was pitched alongside business as usual. Even now, in its current state of belated lockdown, the UK’s unequal distribution of Covid testing sees leading political figures and royal family members prioritized over frontline health workers. In the US too, Trump’s reluctance to accept Covid-19’s utter disregard for capitalism seems to be making his country a deadly hub for infection. Indeed, what seems to unify the far-right at this moment is its propensity toward Covid-denial, exemplified by Trump and Bolsonaro’s regime in Brazil. Apparently, sales of guns and ammunition are soaring across the US as fears of Covid-19 prompt bunker mentality and self-protection. It is also the case that the reported spread of the virus has been coupled to an intensification and extension of population racism. In the UK, again, the spread of so-called maskaphobia has led to many Chinese students having to opt between what sociologist Yinxuan Huang calls “two bad choices - insecurity (for coronavirus) and fear (for racism).”[3] Ultimately, urban spaces may well be redefined by state controlled measures of social distancing, on one hand, or these kinds of fear-driven detachments, on the other; both of which clearly contrast with the themes of the classical sociology of cities, which grasped urban spaces as locales of dynamic collective density.

The logic of the universal virus might also produce novel spatiotemporal realities for collective grassroots systems of care. In the wake of Covid-19, we are already witnessing more than the spontaneous emergence of songs of solidarity. Spain is currently nationalizing private hospitals and introducing a national minimum wage; Iran is releasing political prisoners from jails. These are new spatiotemporal realities produced by Covid-19 that could counter the broader context of what Achille Mbembe has referred to as necropolitics. After the dark refrains of Trump, Brexit and subsequent intensifications of population racism, for example, the deadly horror of Covid-19 might actually clear the way for some kind of large-scale radical reaction that addresses these recent corruptions of the global political scene and its role in quickening climate change and the biodiversity crisis. After the applauding of brave health workers and songs of the shutdown subside, painful social, economic and political struggles will inevitably follow the virus. How these struggles manifest against the shifting backdrop of disciplinary confinement and control by way of statistical inoculation and the abandonment of eradication are yet to be seen.[4] New political assemblages might be triggered, at least temporarily. The question we need to ask now is: what are you doing after the lockdown? We do not mean this to be a catchy social media meme, or indeed a misquotation of Baudrillard, but instead we propose it to be the looming political question we must all face.[5]

This text is based on an original article, Les logiques nouvelles des médias viraux, published by Analysis, Opinion, Critique (AOC) on Wednesday 8th April (https://aoc.media/) and in English (The New Logics of Viral Media) on Friday 10th April on Duke University’s Boundary 2 website.
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos “Covid: The Ethical Disease”. Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political, 13 March 2020: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/03/13/covid-the-ethical-disease/
Sally Weale “Chinese students flee UK after 'maskaphobia' triggered racist attacks: Many say China feels safer than Britain amid coronavirus crisis and increasing abuse”. The Guardian, 17 Mar 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/mar/17/chinese-students-flee-uk-after-maskaphobia-triggered-racist-attacks
Philipp Sarasin “Understanding the Coronavirus Pandemic with Foucault?” Foucault Blog, March 31, 2020: https://www.fsw.uzh.ch/foucaultblog/essays/254/understanding-corona-with-foucault?fbclid=IwAR0t0C9bY3D-j-gyjtxj1f6CDz-0kY0KtgnCUhj9LAuOwMc4r7CC0BxAjSc
See also Tuomas Nevanlinna “Poikkeustilan julistaminen on äärimmäistä vallankäyttöä, mutta ratkaiseva hetki koittaa kun se lakkautetaan (Declaring a state of emergency is an extreme exercise of power, but the crucial moment comes when it is lifted)”. Kulttuuricocktail, 26 March 2020: https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2020/03/28/tuomas-nevanlinna-poikkeustilan-julistaminen-on-aarimmaista-vallankayttoa-mutta

Tony D. Sampson is a critical theorist with an interest in digital media cultures. His publications include The Spam Book, coedited with Jussi Parikka (Hampton Press, 2009), Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion, coedited with Darren Ellis and Stephen Maddison (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). His next book - A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media - will be published by Polity in July 2020. Sampson also hosts the Affect and Social Media international conferences in east London and is co-founder of the community engagement initiative the Cultural Engine Research Group. He works as a reader in digital media cultures and communication at the University of East London. Sampson’s research blog is here: https://viralcontagion.blog/.
Jussi Parikka is Professor at University of Southampton (Winchester School of Art) and Visiting Professor at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague where he leads the project on Operational Images and Visual Culture (2019-2023). In 2019-2020, he is also Visiting Chair of Media Archaeology at University of Udine, Italy. His work has touched on questions of virality and computer accidents in the book Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2nd. updated edition 2016, Peter Lang Publishing) and he has touched on questions of ecology and media in books such as Insect Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and A Geology of Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). The French translation Qu'est-ce que l'archéologie des media? came out in 2018 with UGA Editions. Parikka’s blogsite is at http://jussiparikka.net and you can find him on twitter as @juspar (https://twitter.com/juspar)

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