[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2 on -empyre_

[Vanouse, Paul]

Hello everyone,

I think my situation here is similar to many of you who are primarily experiencing this pandemic as a slow-down, isolate, stay-at-home, talk-to-your-family-on-phone, wait-to-see-if-I’m-sick, worry-about-family-and-friends period.  I’m not quite able to imagine how this will be over soon, yet also unable to imagine the implications for future public events (like university courses and art shows) as we know them.  University at Buffalo ended on-campus classes on March 13 as did the public schools, so since then I’ve been a stay at home artist/professor and home-school dad. Coincidentally, I was supposed to be talking at Cornell today, where I was looking forward to meeting up with  Renate and Tim in person, so its a fitting day to begin a conversation on empyre.

I haven’t yet composed an inspired manifesto for this particular moment, rather I dwell on particular ironies and dialectics.

(1.) The impacted:  The perversity of this pandemic in the US, which now is having a disproportionate mortality rate in African American populations, exacerbated by the delayed national response and historical, structural racisms. Like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017, once again, non-white US populations continually finding oursevles disproportionately in harms way and without timely assistance. Likewise, grocery store clerks and delivery persons are now forced to the front lines in a survival struggle that could’ve been minimized.

(2.) Knowledge production:  In the US there is a long tradition of denigrating intellectuals and learned experts in the name of “common sense”.  If common sense can be correlated to lived experience, it is particularly unsuited for “novel” things like COVID 19, epistemic shifts and post-anthropocentric world-views, all of which are needed at this point. Conservative values are pitted against paradigm shifts, cultural awareness, novel solutions—the out of the ordinary must be decared usual or denied existence.

(3.) Life-sciences:  Much of my artwork of the last twenty years has sought to undermine genome-hype.  This hype is epitomized in tropes like, genetic-fitness, genetic-destiny, and even genetic disease.  My objection has been on at a political, ethical, aesthetic and philosophical level, for instance, my own philosophical objection to reductivism in the bio-sciences.  When I first heard of Watson and Crick’s famed “Central Dogma of DNA” in the 1990s, that ALL information in a cell flows from DNA->RNA->Proteins, I thought something so rigid simply has to be wrong and probably for multiple reasons. Retro-virus like HIV, are composed of viral RNA that reverse transcribes itself into human DNA for instance. Virus like Corona are composed of RNA is directly translated into proteins by a host human cell’s organelles.  Like Jonathan noted in his recent contribution, we humans are being confronted by bugs that don’t fit into our definitions of life and confound our ontologies, our models, our central dogmas. Our challenges are perhaps outgrowing our models.

(4.) Naming: In the US, Trump continually repeats ethnocentric slurs like “China Virus”. Contagions seldom seem to get the correct names.  For instance, we still use the term “Spanish Flu” for the 1918 pandemic, even though the Flu didn’t originate in Spain, nor wreak the most havoc there, rather it was named so because Spain was one of few European countries during WWI not under censorship policies and able to publish reports on the disease.  Unless other nations feel left out, I would suggest the name Trump Flu is better fitting. Here in the US, we could desribe this as the battle of Trump Flu vs. Obamacare.

Anyway, I hope everyone is well and safe and looking forward to connecting with everyone this empyre week…

take care,
Paul

Paul Vanouse
Professor
Department of Art
Director of Coalesce Center for Biological Art
University at Buffalo

On Apr 9, 2020, at 11:25 PM, Sorelle Henricus <sorelle.henricus at gmail.com<mailto:sorelle.henricus at gmail.com>> wrote:

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Thank you Renate, Jonathan, and Elizabeth, and to Junting for inviting me to participate. I've really appreciated the thoughtful and measured, yet personal reflections in my first weeks at empyre as I have been attempting to limit my consumption of news media. However, ironically, the more isolated we become from each other as people, from borders closing, and subsequently this week a bill enforcing a 28 days "circuit breaker" [https://www.gov.sg/article/covid-19-circuit-breaker-heightened-safe-distancing-measures-to-reduce-movement] where households are prohibited from mingling, enforcing "social distancing," the more we are forced to consume news if only to keep abreast of the law.

The rhetoric about the pandemic in Singapore has been driven largely by a paternalistic state, which has been sending reassuring messages to the public while taking measures in phases. The first phase was during the initial outbreak in Wuhan, when travellers from the region were barred from entering or transiting in Singapore. These restrictions were expanded to other affected regions as the centers of the spikes were identified, so Europe and the ASEAN followed by the USA. The narrative was that the threat was coming externally and that by isolating travellers and returning citizens it could be contained. The government had been encouraging working from home and two weeks ago closed bars and nightclubs, barring public or private gatherings of over 10 people. Schools remained open, sending a mixed message to citizens who were wearing masks and using sanitizer and hoarding toilet paper. My daughter has only started "Home Based Learning" three days ago this Wednesday, the day after the circuit breaker bill was passed.

The xenophobia towards the Chinese that was seen in February began to abate as the concerns shifted more internally. The Singaporean population a majority of Chinese ethnicity calls Chinese nationals "PRCs" and considers them "other," often resentful of new immigrants and is expressed on the "blogosphere" and other informal channels. [https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Singaporeans-call-Chinese-people-PRCs]

The past few days, the focus has shifted to a different foreign threat. Foreign workers, largely South Asian, who work in construction and maintenance services in Singapore.
https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/covid-19-record-287-new-cases-spore-219-infections-linked-dorms-foreign-workers-who-had-visited
https://www.ricemedia.co/current-affairs-features-chaos-confusion-migrant-workers-fears-safety-salaries-covid-19/

There was even a kerfuffle where a former minister was embarrassed for calling out foreign workers for gathering at an open field on Sundays their day off saying residents were often inconvenienced by these gatherings and that "it takes a virus to empty the space".
https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/yaacob-ibrahim-apologises-facebook-remark-foreign-workers-gathering-near-kallang-mrt

The situation of bodies, governed by ethnicities and "place-ness", within the microcosm of a society organised by the vector of "the economy" has come to the forefront of thought and discussion with the emergence of Covid-19 as a threat to "life": sustaining the life of bodies, the lived experience of communities, the "health" of the economy, and what is hoped can be eliminated...the epidemiological life of the Covid-19 coronavirus. In this arrangement, I look to my friends Jonathan (as a reader of biological science like myself) and Elizabeth (who, amongst other things, has worked on aspects of racial representation in migrant diasporas).

As a reader of Derrida, I tend to agree with Jonathan on the paradoxical nature of the scientific understanding of "life" and what we might infer from it. Thank you for putting it so beautifully: "It is impossible to render oneself entirely immune to viruses without eliminating the life in oneself."

I am finding that, in Singapore and perhaps all over the world, the threat of contagion is linked essentially to an "other." At the most basic level this other is the "coronavirus" but also, more distinctly, the concern is who is carrying it as a host. For me, this distinction is an iteration of the basic distinction between mind/body, self-other, that is outlined by Derrida as "autoimmunity." The autoimmune thought in this way is a condition that constitutes conscious life. I have been thinking for some time that when Derrida states that “the living ego is auto-immune,” (Specters of Marx, 141) he describes a constitutive operation of the self that is an intervention in the thinking of the relation between “natural life” and “life of the spirit” and is an update to the understanding of Cartesian “dualism” which often stands in as the figure of rationality and allows something like the study of bodies that is "biology."

What's intriguing now with the rhetoric and practice of life in a global pandemic might be how the distinctions between viral life and embodied life, and the factor of bodies as the medium of contagion, intertwine on different circuits: scientific/medical, social/political, and economic/capital. As the policing and erection of borders heightened, the more they highlight the dependence of life as we know it on the transgression of these lines. Derrida's Rogues is particularly poignant here.

I hear those that rejoice the recovery of nature in the wake of the slowing of industrial production, the highlighting of the ethics of labour practices in capitalism, and the vast inequalities between people that have come to light. However, I am concerned about how these issues are to be addressed. As issues that we in the humanities and arts especially have been talking about and working on for decades, what now that we have the attention of the world for what is perhaps a brief moment? Can we recover from predatory capitalism? How will we cope without work or means of subsistence? Must our generation be sacrificed in order to take the time to build new ways of living? Can we trust those in charge to create a new way of being for us?

These questions occupy.

My warmest wishes to everyone,
Sorelle

https://nus.academia.edu/SorelleHenricus

On Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 5:06 AM Jonathan Basile <jonathan.e.basile at gmail.com<mailto:jonathan.e.basile at gmail.com>> wrote:
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Dear all,

Thank you to Junting and Renate for inviting me and to all the guests this week. I'm very excited to take part.


A while ago, my dissertation research on scientific and philosophical definitions of life brought me to focus on viruses, which, ever since a pathogen was given this name, have always problematized the boundaries between the organic and inorganic, life and death. While it doesn’t speak directly to all of the ethical and political issues raised by the COVID pandemic, it has shaped my thinking about aspects of the crisis. In short, the thing that makes us vulnerable to viruses is the thing that makes us alive.

Our knowledge of viruses was necessarily quite abstract at first - when it was found that an agent of disease could pass through filters small enough to trap bacteria these germs were called "viruses," a word that meant poison but whose oldest meaning in English was "semen."

In 1935 a virus was crystallized for the first time, meaning quite literally that a population of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus was formed into a crystal by heating and cooling. This grabbed headlines because up to that time it was assumed there was an absolute distinction between organic and inorganic matter (life and death), but viruses were thought to be organic and crystals inorganic. The synthesis of urea from inorganic chemicals was another milestone in proving this boundary permeable.

Since molecular biology and the deciphering of the "genetic code," life has been understood as what copies itself by storing instructions for reproducing itself in its genes. Viruses have complicated this definition of life because they clearly contain such instructions, but cannot copy "themselves" without "hijacking" the machinery of another cell.

Some theorists and biologists therefore say they are not alive. Sometimes this leads to the funny locution that they are not alive because they are parasites. This may strike us as odd—aren’t parasites alive? If we bear down on the question, we find that in fact no life form can persist without taking something in from the environment and from other living things, and that in fact this responsiveness to the environment (sometimes called purposiveness) is the very definition of life.

Viruses are able to use us as machines because we are machines to ourselves. We are able to live because we can rely on the functioning of our own cellular machinery. Without the hospitality that makes us vulnerable to viruses, our own life would be impossible.

The signs of this are everywhere. One hypothesis (though it is not a consensus view) of the origin of life (abiogenesis) posits that the earliest not-quite-living things were viruses, and that life as we know it originated as a defense against their intrusions upon free-floating nucleotide chains. This is known as the Virus World theory.

Furthermore, some of the most basic means of genetic transfer and continuity among the earliest lifeforms rely upon certain viruses (bacteriophages). And these transfers continue between viruses and all the kingdoms of life, in what can’t even be called inter-species hybridization but, according to prevalent theories, are matings of life with non-life. Ten percent of the human genome is thought to have derived from genes deposited in us by viruses, many of which provide beneficial contributions to our organism.

Viruses are the origin of life and its continuity, and what makes us vulnerable to the worst is also what grants us the possibility of the best. Gene therapy, a cutting edge method for treating diseases that involves implanting genes in our genome, depends on viruses as a gene delivery system. Either a virus has its genetic material removed and synthetic genes implanted in it, or a synthetic carrier is constructed that is modeled after a virus.

While this doesn’t speak directly to the particular political corruption and incompetence exacerbating the COVID-19 pandemic, it is not entirely divorced from an ethico-political reflection on our current crisis. It is impossible to render oneself entirely immune to viruses without eliminating the life in oneself. And it is not simply a metaphorical application of this principle to say that while there are good methods of prevention (e.g. social distancing) against bad viruses, the same logic quickly becomes its opposite. Any intervention that tries to focus aid within our own borders, as if nothing could cross them (for example, sanctions preventing medical supplies from reaching Iran, or stealing PPE from other countries<https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/ppe-world-supplies-coronavirus-163955>), can only exacerbate the pandemic here.

Virality is vitality, for better and for worse.

Best,

Jonathan Basile
Tar for Mortar: The Library of Babel and the Dream of Totality<https://punctumbooks.com/titles/tar-for-mortar/> || em português<https://punctumbooks.com/titles/massa-por-argamassa-a-biblioteca-de-babel-e-o-sonho-de-totalidade/>
jonathanbasile.info<http://jonathanbasile.info/> || libraryofbabel.info<http://libraryofbabel.info/>


On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 12:46 PM Renate Ferro <rferro at cornell.edu<mailto:rferro at cornell.edu>> wrote:
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Many thanks to our special guests Christina McPhee and Melinda Rackham.  Also to William Bain, Simon, Aviva Rahmani, Brett Stalbaum, Cengiz Salman, Gary Hall and of course my two fellow moderators Tim Murray and Junting Huang for posting this past week.  The tone this week has been introspective yet also critical of the political, social, and cultural conditions so many of us are facing globally.  We welcome our next set of invited guests Jonathan Basile, Sorelle Henricus, Gloria Kim, Cengiz Salman, Paul Vanouse, and Elizabeth Wijiaya.  We invite you all to share your thoughts about your own work and experiences from where you are writing this week.  Looking forward to hearing from all of you and again please be well and stay safe.

Also, just to throw this out Christina McPhee had a great idea.  If any of you are making COVID inspired work or work that is generated from our current situation please feel free to post links within the empyre text but also to post on our FACEBOOK page.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/empyrelistserv/

Best to you all,
Renate Ferro

Week 2:  Biographies
Jonathan Basile is a Ph.D. Candidate in Emory University’s Comparative Literature program and the creator of an online universal library, libraryofbabel.info<http://libraryofbabel.info/>. His first book, Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality, has been published by punctum books and translated into Portuguese. His academic writing on biodeconstruction and on irony has been published in the Oxford Literary Review, Critical Inquiry, Derrida Today, Variaciones Borges, Environmental Philosophy, Postmodern Culture, CR: The New Centennial Review and is forthcoming in Angelaki. His para-academic writing has been published in The Paris Review Daily, Public Books, Berfrois, Guernica, and minor literature[s]. This work can be accessed at jonathanbasile.info<http://jonathanbasile.info/>.

Sorelle Henricus works in the areas of critical theory, modern and contemporary literature and visual arts, and aesthetics and politics especially as it pertains to science and technology in culture. Her doctoral work traced the significance of the parallels between deconstruction and molecular biology, particularly converging around the concept of the gene as being constructed as primarily an artefact of data.

Gloria Kim is Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at the University of California-Riverside. She works in the areas of the environmental humanites, science and technology studies, and media and visual culture. She is currently writing a book manuscript titled "The Microbial Resolve: Vision, Mediation, and Security," in which she  explores modes of mediation, forms of kinship, means of capital, and senses of life and living surfacing amid efforts to manage emerging viruses. In a second project, Gloria examines discourses of the microbiome bridging insight from critical data studies, social theory, affect, security studies, material culture, and the anthropocene.

Cengiz Salman (he/him) is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Culture (Digital Studies) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation research broadly focuses on the relationship between digital media, algorithms, unemployment, and racial capitalism. He holds a
Master of Arts degree in Social Science from the University of Chicago (2013), and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology with a specialization in Muslim Studies from Michigan State University (2011). Salman is a recipient of a Fulbright IIE Award, which he used to conduct research on urban transformation projects in Turkey from 2011-2012.

Paul Vanouse is an artist and professor of Art at the University at Buffalo, NY, where he is the founding director of the Coalesce Center for Biological Art. Interdisciplinarity and impassioned amateurism guide his (bio-media) art practice, which uses molecular biology techniques to challenge “genome hype” and to explore critical issues surrounding contemporary biotechnologies. Vanouse’s projects have been funded by Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Sun Microsystems, and the National Science Foundation. His bio-media and interactive cinema projects have been exhibited in over 25 countries and widely across the US. His scent-based bioartwork, Labor, was awarded a Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica, 2019. He has an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University.


Elizabeth Wijaya is Assistant Professor of East Asian Cinema in the Department of Visual Studies and Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She is co-founder of the Singapore-based film production company, E&W Films. She is working on her book manuscript on the visible and invisible worlds of trans-Chinese cinema.

Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rferro at cornell.edu<mailto:rferro at cornell.edu>



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