<div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Hi
everyone,</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Thank you
to Tim and Renate for inviting me (Bishnu) to this forum: I’ve found the exchanges on both
quarantine experiences as well as the virus and its technical mediations over the last
week compelling in more ways than one. I teach global media at UC Santa Barbara, and
California went to shelter in place over a month ago; so, like many of you,
there is little choice but to reflect on viral transmissions, public health,
and the distributive logic of security. The global spectacle is horrifying: not
only is my elderly parent in Calcutta a continuous worry, but the human tragedy
of thousands of migrant laborers walking back to their villages (400 km or more) in
India’s ill-planned lockdown of 1.3 billion people is truly paralyzing. I'm glad to be in a lengthy exchange that is at once capaciously global and firmly focused on the media arts.</span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">I shuttle
beyond the common experience, and my research: for the last few years, I have
been writing a book (<i>The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Mediation</i>)
which traverses some of the ground in the discussions so far. COVID-19 is a
black swan event that will interrupt the book which is on the HIV/AIDS global
pandemic. Unlike this pandemic, the HIV/AIDS pandemic is a long-wave epidemic (four decades, 36
million deaths), but this is precisely why it is an object lesson in the
bitter task of learning to live with viruses. It has taught us as much about
coming viral storms from global hotspots for spillover events (zoonotic viruses
skipping into animal hosts) as it has about the socioeconomic calculates and
divides human populations into those who receive therapeutic benefits and those in disposable congeries (remember Reagan's failures in the early eighties?). One of the aims of the book is to think ecological and public
health mediations <i>together</i>—interdisciplinary enclaves that are ill-fitting.
Post-humanist discourse regards the focus on the human survival inimical to
epidemic thought (the epidemic is “a condition against the demos”) as anthropocentric;
while social science on global health challenges the human as a unitary subject.
I attempt to bridge the chasm through the study of epidemic mediation--not the classical contagion fare (so well documented in Priscilla Wald's <i>Contagious, </i>2005<i>), </i>but technological interventions such as blood tests or predictive
surveillance media. </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">I read Jonathan’s history of the virus as an epistemic object, and
Paul’s elaboration of modeling and simulation with great appreciation. As they suggest,
invisible to the naked eye, the virus has always been a biotechnical assemblage:
as we know, from the first virus (the tobacco mosaic virus was identified in 1892) subjected to scientific study,
these “filterable agents” 100 to 500 times smaller than bacteria were “seen” under the gleam of the electron microscope as late as 1938 (just after the
first crystallization, as Jonathan notes). Mediatic processes—from the preparation
of lab samples to the optical image in the epistemic setting of the lab—set in motion the possibility of altering or
modifying biological substrates of pathogenic viruses, especially during the
crisis event of epidemics. How many times is SARS-CoV-2 the “invisible” enemy?
The scramble for tests is precisely to make viral replication appear as numeric thresholds:
only then can we grasp otherwise indiscernible biological processes. Epidemic
mediation, then, involves the composition of the times, spaces, and agencies of
the virus-human interface. The media theorists I engage for tracing the image, medium, and movement range from Sarah Kember & Johanna Zylinska (<i>Life After New Media</i>), John Durham Peters (<i>Marvelous Clouds</i>) and Hannah Landecker (<i>American Metabolism</i>) to Vilem Flusser (<i>Universe of Technical Images</i>), Cornelia Visemann (<i>Files</i>), and Alex Galloway (<i>The Exploit)</i>.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">The main point: </span><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Viral
epidemics remind us there is no equivalent to penicillin that can kill viruses;
the only choice is to live </span><i style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">with</i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> them, as the bitter lesson of the
HIV/AIDS epidemics taught us. Technical mediations (optical and computational)
play a key role in making interventions in biological processes
possible—everything from blocking viral proteins or contact tracing
surveillance. Media studies attentive to the epistemic settings for processes of
transcription are able to assess and evaluate the historical implications of
such mediation.</span></p></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 8:44 PM akroker <<a href="mailto:akroker@uvic.ca">akroker@uvic.ca</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<div style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif">
<p>The moderators suggested that guests for the 3d week introduce themselves by briefly speaking at first of their own experience of the pandemic. So then, a brief autobiography of (my) life in a time of viral contagion and a brief political biography of its likely consequences from my perspective.</p>
<p>Like everyone, I am sheltering in place at home on Vancouver Island, literally an island of attentive solitude in the global stream of viral contagion. Here, the pandemic has been controlled by means of a strong public health system and political leadership deferring to medical expertise, relying on a widely shared sense of civic responsibility and general care for the community in responding to the virus. Now more than ever in this time of viral delirium, I think of Vancouver Island as a rare, magical intersection of the four meridians of air, earth, fire and water, an undeclared republic tilting towards social justice just off the western continental mass of North America. Social solidarity in the face of viral contagion. </p>
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<p>Ironically, the winter months preceding the pandemic were just the opposite of isolation and social distancing. As part of a collective political struggle during the winter months, many of us were involved in an active alliance between youth and elders involved in indigenous resurgence and environmental activists in protesting the armed occupation of indigenous territories by Canadian federal police in support of aggressive pipeline expansion. Like an epochal rip in the fabric of normal time and space, the Legislature Building here was surrounded by a large encampment of indigenous youth with the lighting of sacred fires, drumming, inspiring speeches, and a field of red dresses symbolizing murdered and missing indigenous women, all of this with a spirit of love, not violence, and very courageous, very determined resolve on the part of indigenous youth and elders. I may have been teaching a seminar on the politics of race and power by day with that haunting trilogy of Black Skin/White Masks, Red Skin/White Masks and Brown Skin/White Masks, but by night many students were at the encampment in active solidarity with indigenous youth, with others responding to frequent appeals during the nighttime hours to come to the Legislature to help protect indigenous youth from possible police violence. What I witnessed over the winter was a glimpse into the possibility of a more just future traced out in all its social creativity, political courage and profound ecological understanding by indigenous thought and practice and by strong alliances between indigenous youth and many other young people conscious of the historical injustices of settler colonialism.</p>
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<p>Then, the pandemic, with all its globalized panic fear and political cynicism. The darkness of this spring just the opposite of the lightness of winter politics. Watching Trump's daily televised orgies of unconstrained narcissism and spasms of self-pity interspersed with viscous scapegoating and cynical lies, all applauded by an enormous popular following howling the rage of their discontents, I was reminded of Deleuze and Guattari's description of the continuing power of appeals to the "inner fascist." Here the political virus of right-wing populism, fueled by panic fear and very real anxiety over the loss of jobs in the very real life context for many people of work or starve. seeks to attach itself to the host cell of the television audience, releasing its genetic instructions, and then waiting as the host cell reproduces the virus, whether expressed in the form of angry white male hysteria, scapegoating of Asians, border violence against asylum seekers, or studied popular silence concerning the cynical hijacking of relief funds by large corporations in the United States and by carbon-heavy energy companies in Canada. The immediate consequences of viral contagion: the eclipse of the social/the death of politics. And something else as well. Something now present as a faint intimation of things to come on the horizon of perception, but then quickly inflating into a really existent reality. And that reality is bio-fascism. The signs are everywhere. A friend from New York texts me to express her concern about how quickly people are eager to surrender civil liberties in the face of the pandemic. She points to the WSJ with its recent article on the alliance between Apple and Google in perfecting contact tracing. Definitely a useful medical tool at the present moment, but after the pandemic a vast extension of the power of corporate surveillance over individual privacy for purposes of targeted relational advertising and, for the national security state, an emblematic breakthrough in power over the bodies of its citizens. Moralized first in the name of public health but later likely to be made permanent in the name of national security and virtual capitalism, contact tracing could well turn out to be a leading talisman of bio-fascism with the workplace future likely to an experiment in bio-politics--segregation of the population, temperature taking, sudden quarantines, rule by emergency decree. All of this while the virtual capitalism of the ruling financial corporations views this as a convenient moment to actualize what has already taken place—the shedding of unnecessary living labor once commerce has fully transitioned to remote labor in the age of the gig economy. Here, surging gun sales and panic hoarding are only symptomatic signs of the death of the social and the eclipse of politics, and all of this to the background music of the coming of age of Bob Dylan's dirge, "Murder Most Fowl."</p>
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empyre forum<br>
<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" target="_blank">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a><br>
<a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a></blockquote></div><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div>Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh</div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">Department of English and Global Studies</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">3431 South Hall</span></div><div dir="ltr"><div>UC Santa Barbara</div><div>Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>