Digital Contagions

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BODY

Biopolitics of Digital Systems

Prologue: How Are Bodies Formed?

The previous section was focused on what happens to practices and definitions of security in network culture. The understanding of security changed, ← 91 | 92 → software became a more central part of computing culture, and the operations of how software is defined across media, the legal system, the industry, and various users became different. The purpose of Section I was to show how computer viruses became perceived as they are most often perceived: as malicious software, as well as operational part of viral capitalism that also extends to the incorporation of a variety of (security and insecurity) services as its monetarized body. The genealogy of digital worms and viruses led us to the projects of the early pioneers in the 1950s and 1960s at the Bell Labs, MIT, and other research facilities, especially in the U.S. As computers and networking became more central to national and international infrastructures and the finance world, viruses and worms were incorporeally transformed into menaces of the information society. They were no longer merely innocent and fascinating, almost-alive programs but started to represent a danger to society at large. The new security standards of digital culture tried to weed out the experimentality of the hacker mentality that also spawned software such as self-reproducing programs. Of course, virus writing did also become a form of vandalism, with no other intent than to cause havoc. Still, we can dig deeper into the political and economic connections that the discourses and practices of computer diseases exemplify. Although I touched mainly on the issue of the viral logic of the capitalist abstract machine and the assemblage of the viral object, such metastable system qualities could be seen as also characterizing, for example, themes of post-Fordist labor practices, where self-organization, the emphasis on communication and interaction, and free movement of the workforce are key modes of operation.3 Also deliberately left for later discussion were the rich implications of the terms themselves: computer virus and worm. As we know, these are concepts that have become familiar through biology, where, for example, the virus has a history of its own. Related to the Latin word for a slimy, repulsive substance, poison, but also virility, viruses entered modern medicine and hygiene during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as minuscule, submicroscopic, infectious agents. “Virus” was actually at first only used to denote an X factor, the unknown cause. As a result of advances in the technologies of microscopes, filtering, and analysis, viruses were gradually identified as parasites of living organisms that themselves occupied a curious twilight zone between life and death with their singular structure of a protein cover over nucleic acid (genetic material).⁴ Viruses became key objects for twentieth-century biochemistry and genetics research, and they were informational before they became integrated into computer culture discourse. ← 92 | 93 →

Computer viruses are often explained as if they were biological viruses. If biological viruses are thought of as submicroscopic actors that can multiply only via living host cells, without a metabolism of their own and consisting of a “pure information” core of DNA or RNA, then digital viruses are often explained through this field.5 Computer viruses become conceptually secondary to biological viruses. They are placed in a spatial grid of representation where their characteristics are metaphorically transported from the discourse of biology.⁶

To talk of computer viruses mobilizes a whole field of references to biology and nature. CPUs are referred to as brains; system networks are environments; computers get infected and sick; and these diseases are countered with vaccines. Consequently, as the perception of biological viruses has never been “innocent,” outside the power/knowledge relations of society, technological viruses are perceived, valorized, and signified similarly in complex fields of culture. Technological objects are embedded in such assemblages where the technological machines are part of social assemblages—synthetic compositions of heterogeneous flows, symbiotic by nature.⁷ Here, the fact that the technology and design of digital culture has “borrowed” from biology (and vice versa) does not fall entirely under the notion of “metaphorics” but can be approached also as a more fundamental becoming biological of digital culture identified by Tiziana Terranova as part of the politics of network culture: technics of nature, biological computation, and the wider vocabulary of emergence that started to infect information culture since the 1990s.⁸ This theme, analyzed in more detail in the next section, is part of the material assemblages of digitality. For example, the intensive qualities of software (how it functions, acts, and reacts in relation to other software, operation systems, and protocols) are not reducible to discourses but present materially specific technical effects and affects as well. Using biologically attuned models and modes of analysis (such as ecology) does not have to be seen as succumbing to easy-going metaphorics. Instead, as the early designers of digital culture themselves thought, nature and biology have presented complex ways of seeing objects, couplings, and processes that were already transported as part of the new models of digitality. This does not mean that technology is biological and evolves naturally. Quite the contrary. We have to be aware of the historical nature of this coupling of biology and computation, of new models of emergent intelligence and networking, of the forms of software that do not escape a political economy even if they seem to refer to scientific models that are closely aligned with learning from nature. Providing a critical genealogy of this situation is important. ← 93 | 94 →

To talk of viruses is to talk of embodiment, but not merely involving human bodies. Computer software has raised the question as to what could be the electronic embodiment of computer culture, and where is materiality placed in this picture? For sure, addressing viruses, one has to take into account the wider political history of the viral—both as a metaphor and as operationalized tool of exclusion and stigma. This section is thus dedicated to investigating the various bodily metamorphoses in viral culture. It’s a sort of an obvious route to take: computer viruses appeared to the popular consciousness around the same time as AIDS and HIV. As in the AIDS discourse, the connotations, articulations, and contexts of digital contagions have political, gendered, and sexualized implications and consequences, with disease and health acting not just as medical concepts but also as a structuration of the power of digital culture. As “life” and the living body became crucial components of the fields of power and knowledge during the nineteenth century, in a similar vein the digital body and “computer life” became objects of keen societal interest in the latter half of the twentieth century.9 It also was insufficient to talk of the body merely as a general category, or of life as something of a universal. Instead, through viral and disease markers, bodies got marked, divided into goods and bads, operationalized, contained, gendered; the gay body, the female body, the infecting body, the unstable body—a variety of pejorative uses of the term in the midst of a wider discursive production of different models of embodiment in the social field that included technologies of computing and networks. To talk of the care of the biological self extended to operations that tried to address the pedagogy of the technological subject as part of the society of control.

But where to start the discussion of the body? What is a body?—a question that seems too obvious but already over the decades of feminist theory complexified, too. An important first step is to acknowledge that a body is not something that is necessarily human. Bodies exist across a multiplicity of scales. To quote Deleuze: “What is the body? We do not define it by saying that it is a field of forces, a nutrient medium fought over by a plurality of forces. For, in fact, there is no medium, no field of forces or battle. There is no quantity of reality, all reality is a quantity of force.”¹⁰ In a Nietzschean vein, cultural analysis is “lowered” to the level of forces that produce the visibility of bodies. Any body whatsoever—and body is always also already qualified—is constituted within a field of forces that refers to physical as much as social, conceptual terms. Bodies are not merely visible and intact molar bodies but also molecular becomings that emphasize this affective, minoritarian nature, ← 94 | 95 → which, for example, Rosi Braidotti builds her concept of the body on. I also want to insist that it is the task of an archaeological analysis to excavate such constellations of forces that define and operationalize bodies but also show their nonlinear and open-ended nature.11

For Deleuze and Spinoza, bodies are defined not by the class or genus they inhabit (chemical, biological, geographical, social, political, technological, etc.) but by the compositions they form with other bodies and the relations of motion and rest. This ethological view of the world suggests that everything forms on a plane of immanence and is thus capable of affecting others on the same plane. Of course, such foldings and connections have always been highly regulated. Paths between the insides and outsides of the body are part of the power architectures of a culture, of maintaining cultural hierarchies, based on inscriptions of “health.” Naturally, disturbances are consequently understood through images of disease, of dangerous mixings, of leaking bodies, as in sickness or the mystified menstrual cycle of the female sex.¹² The biological body and the body politic are in an intimate isomorphic relationship with each other, revealing how the epidemia “works on the social bond; it may reinforce, transform or undo it.”¹³

Embodiment can be approached through specific genealogies of the body politic and its media ecology, from the city and the state to the architectures of computation. The imagery of the body politic was tied to a longue durée of the social order of the state as a body. The ruler is the head, merchants the stomach, soldiers the executing organs (hands), and peasants the feet. The analogies were used by philosophers such as Plato to differentiate between a healthy polis and a “feverish” one. Later, in medieval times, the figure of the body politic became mobilized to evoke unity: the world is a hierarchical whole, similar to an organism with its governing head. Whether the empire or the religious corpus mysticum et politicum of the papal Church, order equaled hierarchy, which equaled health of the body. For instance, in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (1159), the head is the prince, the heart equals the senate, and the soul is analogous to the clergy. In a similar manner, the body politic analogy worked in matters material, such as the organization of the city. This interfacing of the body and the city acted as a power apparatus for channeling bodies into proper Christians, and for those who were considered barely human, such as Jews.¹⁴

Later the body politic was appropriated as an integral part of the corpus in early modernity, with, for example, the theories of sovereignty and state of early modernity. With Leviathan we have a new formation (yet a ← 95 | 96 → continuation of the Christian body politic) where the (standard male) individual body is part of the body politic. Leviathan was no longer, however, the expression of transcendent religious unity, but an artificial body, established through contract.15 The idea of an organic and unified body was used continuously through a mobilization of health and disease. Referring to the natural state of a body in contrast to disease and sickness proved to be a strong and strategically useful image even after the religious connotations had vanished. In Leviathan, were perhaps the figures of sickness, part of the artificial man of the state (civitas), now seen not as metaphysical evils but as dissonances that have to be taken care of, managed, and channeled into health? Is sickness of the body as a management problem that harks back to issues of security?¹⁶

The practical task with the image of body politic was to establish unity (and weed out multiplicity, translated as disease). With modern technological media and transnational political networks, this situation has further complicated. Whereas early modernity functioned through the city, the state, and the body politic that guaranteed order alongside such lines, the poststate era of networks has been obliged to find alternatives to this form of ordering. Even Foucault turned to issues of security in his later lectures, emphasizing security not merely as disciplinary containment but also as ensuring controlled circulation of the things (diseases, etc.).¹⁷ But coming to technical networks, whether the later social media platforms and Internet infrastructures, or the earlier versions of networking since the 1960s, the issue is not merely of biological diseases or human bodies. Also important are the bodies and biopolitics of the biochemical and the molecular (genes, bacteria, viruses) and nonhuman actors (objects and processes in digital network ecology, such as software). This can be also thought of as the move from disciplinary societies to societies of control, but also of security. Whereas discipline functioned through the distribution of bodies in space—the biopower of the body politic of cities and states—the control society focuses increasingly on algorithmic codes and passwords and the modulation of cybernetic patterns.¹⁸ What we have with network societies and the third nature of telecommunications is a new mode of digital biopower that operates on “the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter”¹⁹ that form the contemporary media ecology.

Since the discoveries of William Harvey in the early seventeenth century concerning blood circulation, movement and circulation have been general standards also for a healthy body and a flourishing city. As Richard Sennett notes, Harvey’s discoveries were soon translated into discourses and designs of public spaces and urban media ecology where free movement equaled health. ← 96 | 97 → A healthy body in a healthy society was understood through the paradigm of flow.20 Hence, the biopolitics of bodies acted through the medium of the city, and even though the focus has slowly moved toward underlining the healthy flow of networks, the logic seems to remediate earlier examples. The age of technical networks as key organizational models can be seen emerging at the end of nineteenth century, and hence the rise of network capitalism dates much further back than the age of computers. As Schivelbusch notes, the new vectors of movement represented by the railroads, steamships, and the telegraph enabled new sorts of flow of things and messages, where circulation (of people, goods, and information) was to guarantee a balanced social situation. A commentator from 1895 emphasized the importance of roads, railways, and waterways as “the arteries through which this blood is conducted, while telegraphs and telephones may be compared to the nerves which feel out and determine the course of that circulation, which is a condition of national prosperity.”²¹ The regulatory ideal of a healthy body works also in the age of computational networks, where obstacles to the flow of information are seen as instances of disease and imbalance in a manner that resonates with the early articulations between the biology of blood circulation, rising capitalist economic theories, and city planning.

Recent years have seen a heightened interest in the topic of terrorists moving in the pathways of such global networks both on a macro physical level (transport, territorial claims, etc.) and on the micro levels of digital communication (social media platforms, software-enabled cybercrime). Such complex systems of global scale have made the problem of identification of malicious flows difficult, which has further emphasized the need to find effective control mechanisms to filter the circulatory systems. Good examples are the Snowden leaks about the massive and controversial NSA and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) surveillance programs, which themselves have been identified as security problems. Whereas in the more or less binary Cold War global system the enemy was more easily located and spatialized, the multifarious nature of the network society finds its enemies within itself, dispersed, heterogeneously distributed. This expresses the biopolitics of the digital body, where the pathogenic networks are countermeasured with network organization and software.²² Paranoia is not merely a narrative theme reserved for Pynchon novels but an increasingly effective part of the regulatory surveillance mechanisms of the enemy within.

This section is again interested in formations. In other words, my argument concerns the formation, the emergence of bodies, the production of the ← 97 | 98 → body digital and the computer (network) as the central diagram or abstract machine of network culture. What types of forces define the borders and thresholds of this digital body? What is produced as normality, what as abnormality? What sort of cultural techniques define the insides and outsides of the computational architecture? How is disease differentiated from health? In other words, what would be a better way to approach health than through the breakdown of this presumed unity? In this sense, the concept of the body is close to the definition of an assemblage; health is a process and a network, as Andrew Goffey elaborates, referring to Deleuze.23 Power aims to seal off this processuality and to form hierarchies and stable nodes that connect the flow of lines, yet networks gain their force only from the connections they establish. In this sense, understanding immunities is vital: Do we conceptualize the self and immunity as a field of military operations, or do we try to move in the direction of networks as flexible systems of adaptation?

Diagrams of Contagion

Viruses have been understood since the nineteenth century as foreign elements invading otherwise integral bodies. They are the Other, the abject, the ever so slightly difficult element that exists outside identity. Or as Joost Van Loon puts it: “Viruses make us ill because they are replicating themselves; like waste, they are virulent abjects of modernity.”²⁴ They are what could be called a floating signifier, too—they have been a marker of disease, ideologically unwanted and the system anomaly. The novel The Adolescence of P-1 portrays viruses as something comparable to “communists” and “cancer”—all three symptoms of the anomalous and the point where the biological, the political, and the technological seem to coalesce. First it was the Russians, then the viruses that had to be kept out: “If Simpson had any idea that he had Russians in his computer, he’d scream.”²⁵

Luca Lampo from the net art group [epidemiC] emphasizes the importance of this construction of the anomalous and connects it to a mental history of fear of the other:

The virus—both as a concept and an assemblage—has been a complex mesh of overlapping meanings and pejorative uses. It’s far from a neutral term and is often used for particular purposes. But how did it become meaningful to speak of not only biological virality? A brief answer would suggest via language—just as HIV spread from being a medical term to being a general cultural entity. HIV infects cultural categories: “AIDS is a disease, an industry, a career, a universal signifier that invites us to share a concern over our being in the world, and even invites us to condemn the evil that has brought it into our world.”²⁷ Of course, it was already much before AIDS that diseases and catastrophes could be said to have been a contagious media phenomena. Similar to rumors. A good early example is the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the first worldwide (at least Europe-wide) media event that horrified people in images and in words. For decades it was recounted in numerous pamphlets and letters, such as the letter that was turned into a public media story and reprinted in various countries: “An Account of the late dreadful earthquake and fire, which destroyed the city of Lisbon, the metropolis of Portugal: In a letter from a merchant resident there, to his friend in England.”²⁸

Diseases and catastrophes are not merely linguistic representations but, more fundamentally, events.²⁹ The event of AIDS, the event of a computer virus infection synthesizes into a machinic assemblage and includes various types of flows from incorporeal acts of judgment (“You are sick! What did you do to deserve this? Practice safe hex as a digital version of safe sex!”) to corporeal movements and interactions of bodies (whether animal fluids or the electronic world of code). Another way to describe the issue is to talk of the incorporeal act with which the technological machinations, bits of code that self-reproduce are named “viruses”—an event that summons a plethora of cultural and historical stratifications. As a judge might have the power with an incorporeal act to transform an innocent person into a guilty one,³⁰ so the media, computer scientists, and security specialists are among the key groups that have “pronounced” the malicious nature of these programs, turning them into menaces to, and diseases of, organized society.

In her essay “Illness as Metaphor” (1978), Susan Sontag demonstrates the power of articulations. Language exists as a powerful set of active interventions in the world that incite and suggest, channel and contain. Tuberculosis and cancer, to take two central diseases of the last centuries, are perceived and ← 99 | 100 → signified not as mere clinical constructs but as more complex machinations. Tuberculosis, along with hysteria, was articulated together with Romantic ideals of feminine subjects, suffering but idealized bodies. Tuberculosis was an artistic disease, taking over the lungs, the part of the human body most associated with the nearly immaterial ether of creativity. It was also an illness of the poor—“of thin garments, thin bodies, unheated rooms, poor hygiene, inadequate food.”31 In contrast, cancer was something low, degrading, and middle class, usually striking the “lower parts” of the body: colon, bladder, rectum, breasts cervix, prostate, testicles. What Sontag has succeeded in demonstrating is the synthetic, machinic nature of diseases (to transform the issue into Deleuzian vocabulary): diseases are assemblages, heterogeneous articulations of bodily metamorphoses (viruses and bacteria acting on the molecular level), societal reactions (disease control, medications, hospitals, various other institutions, border control), and order-words (seeing language primarily as ordering and commanding, instead of communicating). Diseases are a mobilization, a synthesis of a whole arsenal of cultural institutions, metaphors, articulations, and references.