[-empyre-] Epidemic Mediation

[Bishnupriya Ghosh]

Hi everyone,



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.



I shuttle beyond the common experience, and my research: for the last few
years, I have been writing a book (*The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic
Mediation*) 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
*together*—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 *Contagious, *2005*), *but technological interventions
such as blood tests or predictive surveillance media.



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 (*Life After New Media*), John Durham Peters (*Marvelous
Clouds*) and Hannah Landecker (*American Metabolism*) to Vilem Flusser
(*Universe
of Technical Images*), Cornelia Visemann (*Files*), and Alex Galloway (*The
Exploit)*.


The main point: Viral epidemics remind us there is no equivalent to
penicillin that can kill viruses; the only choice is to live *with* 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.

-- 
Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh
Department of English and Global Studies
3431 South Hall
UC Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170
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