Love in the Time of Corona*, Or, Holding Breath to Get Closer: a Politics of Virality in the Nascent Coronocene (C.c.)

“…but while the Virus may seem to be the radical exit from geontopower at first glance, to be the Virus is to be subject to intense abjection and attacks, and to live in the vicinity of the Virus is to dwell in an existential crisis” (6).

—Elizabeth Povinelli

P0:

Currently, i am sitting on my porch. i watch the hill behind the fence. sun’s out; clouds part for a blue sky. How's the weather? Or, more aptly, what’s the weather? in Hyperobjects, Timothy Morton interrogates the platitude and its implications in worlding. Accordingly, it references or conjures a spatiotemporal, conceptual, structural, or material embodiment that obtains a nebulous specificity: a hyperobject*—the weather—as it flickers between the foregrounds and backgrounds that elude, encompass or pass-thru our multitudinous umwelts. Currently, Corona’s the weather. Corona is worlding; it affects our sense of [the] world¹, and is affecting in some hyperbolic ways. Corona was then, is now, is soon and then later. Corona was there, is now here, and thus, everywhere.

Here, i want to consider a politics of virality. Contrary to virility, which asserts/bluffs an ontological condition corded with robust, masculine hyper-aggression, virality refers to, quite knowingly, a state of being viral—a sort of ontology that emerges through circulation, infection, contamination; deathly, but not terminal; punctured, [leaking] flu/id², and not still, not an absence-of; weakened and weakening; intimate, aloof, invisible, but thrilling or sensational, and not necessarily spectacular or sublime. While both terms—virility v. virality—may qualify as bodily acts and as hyperobjects (or as simply hyper), and express similar genomes, they do not share blood, yet spill it in negotiating viscous-vivacious³ [post]colonial encounters. Indeed, the latter, virality, surrounds the former, virility, which itches, indicates or threatens to push [it] out or clean away (2, 4, 5).

“the Virus copies, duplicates, and lies dormant even as it continually adjusts to, experiments with, and tests its circumstances. It confuses and levels the difference between Life and Nonlife while carefully taking advantage of the minutest aspects of their differentiation” (6).

virality imagines⁴ vitality. it dreams of it, devours, then aspires towards it. It realizes and apprehends, emulates and reiterates it. hides from it. does it. virality happens upon vitality (it invites itself in on a host); it is perhaps a vitality of its own rite. and yet, Corona’s capacity to perform vitality does not fully speak to it’s tentacular agency. One does not simply move on from the coronavirus, as its critters errantly hop from One to the Other, from Others to the One, and right back to the Other, and so on. Corona’s agency is microscopic yet massive, is all-over-world(s), is shady yet persuasive to bronchial tissue, is statistically diffuse, yet compacts uniquely upon political and cultural differentiations. Corona distributes its own ecology onto other ecologies, inflicting itself on the worldly yet personal, political, medical, physiological, biological, sexual, necrological, technological, economical. Corona’s virality chooses virovulnerable bodies and confuses, calibrates, or corrupts capable bodies. we do not currently have a solution [a vaccine], so fuck herd-immunity (1). Corona has herded immunity; and so we exercise state enforced herd-prevention. coronavit/rality differs from Bennet’s distributive agency; it festers with an insidious disposition, and urges to enact desperate yet fatal [dis]possession.

Biologically, it is a [dis]possession of cells, the holoents immanent and vital to human corpo-realities⁵. Politically, and similarly, the viral propensity to [dis]possess informs and incites a fear for the bodies into which the coronavirus looks for hosts to steal the homes-of; a fear of being punctured, confused-with, and then superseded by foreign agents. Indeed none of this is without the meddling of our current state of governance, which continues to commit itself to straining inter-national relations, immigration bans, and contagious racist, xenophobic rhetoric and literature. The vignettes of state language are bristled with these tragic splinters, which in hefty sweeps comb poor, homeless, Black, indigenous, and immigrant people towards further fringe, enacting state-approved push out (6). And nevertheless, COVID-19 punctured the American livelihood, threatening to dissolve (or explode) the fleshy cape of its cellular membrane: what had once promised to enforce a contained and controlled osmosis⁶ now waits on the news instead. Corona is a terrorist turned U.S. citizen, whether we like it or not.

“the Virus and its central imaginary of the Terrorist provide a glimpse of a persistent, errant potential radicalization of the Desert, the Animist, and their key imaginaries of Carbon and Indigeneity (6).

The State has asked us to practice social distancing, or, more aptly, distanced socialization; to exercise self-quarantine; to auto-quarantine, which is now sym-quarantine, and, given the recent surge of certain technofixes such as Zoom, sim-quarantine; to be with virtually, vicarity.

P1: Holes

[to be continued...]