On the Horror of Living Networks
Surely we as human beings are more than the microbes that inhabit us. Microbes, strictly speaking, are not ‘animals’ – they’re microbes. We are animals…we think – except that our thinking about our animality makes us more than animals. Yes (we say to ourselves), we are more than our microbes. Except, of course, when ‘our’ microbes are not ours (infection), or when ‘our’ microbes are always coming-and-going (contagion). The biological processes of contagion and infection always elicit a certain anxiety and fear for us. Contagion and infection are more than mechanisms of antigen recognition and antibody response; they are, as our textbooks tell us, entire ‘wars’ and ‘invasions’ continuously fought on the battle lines of the human body (to which autoimmune disorders add degrees of metaphorical complexity).
Contagion and infection are paradoxical processes. They elicit a rigorous ‘defense’ of the body’s boundaries, and yet we as living beings are defined by our continuous exchange of matter and energy with our surroundings. Only certain things are allowed to pass, only certain things are exchanged. All of this denotes a systems-wide, network perspective. It is no accident that computer networks, economic exchanges, and cultural ideas have been described in terms of viruses (computer viruses, viral marketing, memes). There is an abstract topology pervades each of these systems; they are constituted by nodes and edges which have variable rates of exchange and connectivity. It is for this reason that many ‘network science’ perspectives have studied biological and computer viruses interchangeably: the microbe is the ‘message’ that is passed along channels of contagion (the edges) between each person (the nodes).
Thus, the ‘war’ the takes place in contagion and infection is not simply limited to the body’s interior; it is also a conflict that is scaled up, as it were, to the level of the population, and indeed, the nation. This is the point where virology and immunology fold onto epidemiology and public health. The task of public health agencies is thus to distinguish ‘good’ circulations (travel, trade) from ‘bad’ circulations (virulent microbes). Microbes establish networks of infection within a body, and networks of contagion between bodies, and our modern transportation systems extend that connectivity across geopolitical borders.
However, it is misleading to say that microbes ‘do’ this or that they ‘do’ that, as if they were little demons with malintent. It is equally misleading to simply say that we humans ‘do’ this or ‘do’ that, especially as most epidemics involve many factors that include microbial evolution, drug-resistance, and environmental factors, in addition to the more human concerns of education, preventive practices, and prescription drugs. Indeed, if microbes are in some way synonymous with networks, then the whole question of agency is rendered problematic. It is this that incites the greatest discomfort, a kind of ‘biohorror’ specific to these types of living networks. Not only do the networks of contagion and infection render human agency and control problematic, but, when we take into account all the factors that go into an epidemic, we see as many unhuman agencies as human ones. Representations of epidemics in popular culture – from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year to modern zombie films – can be understood as cultural reactions to this strange, fearful, unhuman life of microbial networks.
In fact, we are still unsure as to whether viruses are living or non-living – they seem to be simple assemblages of matter without the ability to independently reproduce, and yet modern biology has revealed their troubling ability to mutate and exchange genetic material with a host organism. Virologists have suggested that the old question of the living/non-living status of viruses is superceded by another question: the role that viruses have played in planetary, even cosmic evolutionary processes, whether or not they are ‘alive.’ It seems that microbes are not only primordial, but that they have developed innovative ways of living through we human beings. Should we say the reverse as well, that human beings have developed innovative ways of living through microbes?
(Originally published as part of an essay in ArtNodes Journal, Issue 6)
On the horror of organised chaos - response to Thacker
- Robert Jackson
(University of Plymouth)
Dr Eugene Thacker's position paper exhibits a necessary point, even if he chose not to make it explicit. Critical Theory and most of it vicissitudes, have consistently degraded the human in a strategy worthy of a serial killer. But the serial killer did not wish to kill off the human outright, for it was having too much fun torturing it. Wave after wave of degradation; power structure, discourse, language, Western hypocrisy, the slipping of the trace, anti-essence, technology, posthumanism, transhumanism (is there a difference?). Yet critical theory was too critical in its endeavour, in order to be critical, one must have something critical as a basis of critique, and seeing as we know logocentric human culture best, the aim was to always-already keep that in focus.
The recent speculative shift from critique into conjecture, has offered a genuine counter. Rather than constantly pull the rug from underneath us, speculation seeks to understand what could or will happen, rather than consistently reminding us about what is happening. Admittedly, this has a faint twinge of the blind leading the blind, but it may eventually succeed in removing the tortured human from the palatable procedures of critique: not for the reason that human beings have any necessary importance whatsoever, but that the removal of human beings opens up conjecture on worlds without a basis of human agency presupposing it.
Thacker proceeds by showing us that the beautiful pure body is a wretched myth. True. As others have shown (see Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature [2007], The Ecological Thought [2010], Harvard University Press), the distinctions between life and non-life, are untenable at best (as Iain Hamilton Grant said mockingly for the recent conference Object Oriented Thinking, RCA, London, 1st July 2011, "all humans are basically proteins that drink coffee"). By what yardstick, do we begin to say 'this is life'; would you like to pick DNA as the main instigator? Fair enough. But DNA cannot exist without viruses, insertions, visions, viroids, plasmids and RNA (Sol Spiegelman), viruses are empty formalised relationships with blind algorithms at their base. What viruses actually consist of, are circular pieces of RNA, that effectively encapsulate a signal, telling cells to reproduce the viruses own crystal structure. The 'poor' cell only receives enough information needed to carry out its task, without needing to capture the exact reason, thus infection ensues.
If this process is life, then computer viruses must also satisfy the criteria (in fact viruses are a neat example of how encapsulated objects in the Object Oriented Programming paradigm actually function). This contagious logic, as Thacker correctly asserts, operates at all levels, from populations, cells, servers and solar systems. There is no 'pure' life, it's a placeholder of coherence that reality consistently disproves.
However, I do wish to issue one disagreement here, and its regarding a discrepancy between order and disorder. Whilst agency is dismissed as semi-grounded in chaos, or the conscious and unconscious as reducible to involuntary encounters with blind agents, this puts a huge strain on the chaotic underground to do all the work. If actors must act, then from what structural basis do they exist in action?
If a chaotic network is still a network, then where is the execution? I advance a position not from disorder in the first instance, but from routine order. Blind algorithms are ordered and they work; they abide by rules and inputs, which are nonetheless contingent, and in turn execute these rules in repetition until the calculation is finished, or even if it must continue infinitely. To say that chaos grounds delusionary order, offers a speculation onto what grounds chaos. What grounds chaos? More chaos presumably. The usual retort is one of appealing to chaos ex nihilo, but this only leads to the assumption that there is nothing tangible to disorderly behaviour other than a primordial soup of relations.
What if RNA code was predicated as a simple formalised rule, such that when executed within a system, it generated a disorder completely irreducible to those rules. Rather than emphasise the 'net' of the network, let's emphasise the executant-cy of the 'work' without possible remit for a teleological result.
Thus, as a counter (and not one that I can argue tangibly at this moment in time), what stops us from conceiving the notion that disorder arises from order? An order that is mechanistic, but not physical. Just because a procedure is ordered, does not mean it is predictable. What we interpret as disorderly and unpredictable could be an output from simple order executing from within. This is an infinitely more horrible situation. A determined chaos, irreducible to prediction. Does agency even know what it is when it goes to work?
Contagion Theory Beyond the Microbe by Tony D. Sampson
In response to Eugene Thacker’s position paper
Contagion Theory Beyond the Microbe (and perhaps beyond networks too)
Tony D Sampson
, University of East London
In response to Dr Thacker’s important contribution to the network culture debate, and contagion theory in particular, I’d like to expand and develop upon four points that his paper interestingly raises. My aim here is to use these to further grasp the value of contagion (and infection) in the development of social theory, and in turn use these ideas to question what constitutes the social in itself.
1. What Spreads
Although positioning microbial contagion as a distinctly non-human affair, Thacker suggests an intriguing and perhaps purposefully indistinct human relation to it insofar as he draws attention to how “we feel” about becoming infected. The most apparent of these feelings triggered by “our” contagious encounter with the microbe tends to produce the negative emotions of “fear” and “anxiety”. These are, it would seem, feelings increasingly exploited by the defenders of network sovereignty - particularly in defending against threats posed by the cultural and biological viruses of the terrorist cell. However, acknowledging the argument put forward by cognitive scientist George Lakoff, who sees the triggering of feelings relating to infection as part of a manipulation of the neurological bindings, or metaphorical frames, of a mostly unconscious political mind, I ask, is it not what we feel about what spreads that becomes the most effectual contagion of all? The passing on of a touchy-feely kind of contagion is not the same as a non-human biological invasion. What spreads turns such crude biological determinism on its head by significantly placing social encounter ahead of biological adaptation.
Contagion is not necessarily cast in negative feelings of fear and anxiety either. In my position paper on Viral Love at the Thinking Network Politics conference in Cambridge last month I proposed to broaden out the politics of contagion theory to a far wider social field of feelings, emotions and affects. Following the contagion theory set out by Gabriel Tarde in the late 1800s, the most ingenious and potent of viral political strategies appeals to the desire to love and be loved in return, and the potential to contagiously pass on those loving feelings to others. Contagion spreads through passions, obsessions, and other empathic transfers of affective desire that enter into the porous neuronal relations that connect the self to the other and other things. This is not an exclusively biological contagion. What spreads, as Thrift and Brennan point out, is what passes through an intersection point or artifice. It is an encounter between the social and the biological (if that distinction is worth making) that triggers contagion. What spreads occurs in an adaptive atmosphere of affect. As Brennan put it… “My affect, if it comes across to you, alters your anatomical makeup for good or ill.”
2. Mechanism Independence
If contagion theory moves beyond the microbe as the description of what spreads, what shall it be called - the meme perhaps, or a mechanism resembling a computer virus? Well if we are to persist in avoiding biological determinism then certainly not! The meme/gene analogy is the definitive biological determinant. Although it interestingly points to the often unconscious transmission of infection, it over classifies contagion as an entirely mechanistic evolutionary unit (see Blackmore e.g.). Again, as Brennan brilliantly argued against neo—Darwinism:
"… the individual organism is born with the urges and affects that will determine its fate. Its predisposition to certain behaviors is part of its individual genetic package, and, of course, these behaviors are intrinsically affective. Such behaviors and affects may be modified by the environment, or they may not survive because they are not adaptive. But the point is that no other source or origin for the affects is acknowledged outside of the individual one. The dominant model for transmission in neo—Darwinism is genetic transmission… and the critical thing about it here is that its proponents ignore the claims of social and historical context when it comes to accounting for causation." (Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 74.)
I would prefer instead to look to Tarde’s much earlier social theory of imitation, which realizes that contagion can be triggered by an array of repetitive social inventions and performances, such as a thought, a conversation, an affect, a feeling, an emotion, and many other interlocking things that resonate from out of an event. Contagion is, as such, not of the logical order of the evolutionary microbe, meme or computer virus, but a capricious mechanism-independent force flowing out of encounters with events.
What can this contagious force of encounter tell us about the social? Well, it is certainly not Durkheimian. It is neither subject-bound nor obligated to the social facts of a collective consciousness, but rather a social that (re)produces itself through inter-subjectivity, or even infra- subjectivity (dipping below consciousness as it often does). Tarde called these social encounters imitative radiations; Thrift calls it affective contagion. Indeed, Thrift, Borsch, and more recently Latour and Lépinay , have all pointed to a revived Tardian political economy founded on the passing-on of contagious passions, glories, influences etc. Money is not the only yardstick by which to measure the economy. This is a political economy approach that intervenes in the notion of the self-contained and rational nature of Homo Economicus as it does the determinations of an economic infrastructure. It instead opens up the social to what Tarde called contagious “passions of unprecedented intensity.”
Following the location in neuroscience of so-called mirror neurons that seem to receive and broadcast empathic transfers or shared feelings, what spreads might be thought of in terms of a neurologically defined agency contagiously flowing in-between mostly unconscious visceral sensory inputs (pleasant, desirable, as well as fearsome, anxious). To be sure, in the guise of the neuromarketing expert, armed with EEG, eye tracking and emotional recognition technology, the experience economy is becoming better acquainted with how to quantify the flows of contagious passion.
3. What Diagram
What diagram do we use to trace these contagious flows, the network perhaps? Well, in part yes. For that is what the new science of networks (in cahoots with new media businesses) has been doing for sometime now. Learning from how viruses of all kinds spread on a network and feeding that knowledge back into marketing models and fads intended to improve sales. Network epidemiology, as it has been called, becomes part of an effort to discover how consumer pass-on power spreads and how it can be manipulated. However, as even Duncan Watts concedes, the network model has its limits. It tends to freeze both time and space. Although, via shifts in modelling techniques from threshold theory to scale free power laws to the accidents of influence, it is becoming possible to better trace the flow of an epidemic, it is the event that is missing from a space standardized by nodes and edges. Indeed, the network does not do events! Galloway and Thacker’s own dissatisfaction with network science seems to point to a similar problem.
The question for social theory is how to include the event in the diagram of contagion. What I propose in my forthcoming book (Virality: Contagion Theory in the age of Networks, University of Minnesota Press) is a move away from the nodes and edges of network fever to the assemblages and events of virality, or what Massumi similarly calls the networkability of the event. In a nutshell this requires an assemblage theory and events philosophy that rethinks the social relation to topological spaces, non-substance and accidents. It requires a further discussion on the distinction between, on the one hand, Tarde’s mostly capricious contagions, and on the other, recent claims made by Thrift concerning how contagious accidents may in fact be manipulated.
4. Viral Agency
Lastly, the problem of human agency comes to the fore in Thacker’s work. Again though, be aware that the question concerning viral life, and its relation to human life, is too often fixed in the metaphorical-analogical artifice that divides the social and the biological, supporting the notion that there are biological mechanisms functioning outside of, and independent of, the social field. Yes “we humans” do mix with a whole host of non-human and human biological agencies mostly unawares (viruses, pheromones, hormones, feelings, affects etc.), and we are on the whole unconscious during infectious encounters, but that does not make such agency-free relations non-social. The social is, for the most part, an involuntary association that drifts in and out of a somnambulistic slumber. As Tarde argues in the preface of Laws of Imitation volition and habit are inseparable.
"Nothing… is less scientific than the establishment of this absolute separation, of this abrupt break, between the voluntary and the involuntary, between the conscious and the unconscious. Do we not pass by insensible degrees from deliberate volition to almost mechanical habit?"
To conclude then, it is important to point out that a theory of the social as openly vulnerable and porous to the contagions of others (and other things), has many political ramifications. With a similar focus on contagious empathic transfers, particularity those established in echoic neurological relations with objects, Barbara Maria Stafford makes, as such, a useful intervention into the old dichotomy between rational freewill and ideological false consciousness by noting how the imitative relation with the other begins entirely with the involuntary encounter. That is perhaps how humans co-exist with non-human agents.