sofi-now

[sofi-now]

-Many people have fantasies about viruses - because viruses so readily traverse what we imagine as our bodily borders. A virus may move from outside to inside “me” without my knowledge or control, thereby making evident how unself-contained “I” am; -the virus as a sign of corporeal porosity or borderlessness that provokes paranoid fantasies of invasion, penetration, and foreign occupation.  - Whatever else they do, viruses remind their human hosts of our species’ physical vulnerability: virality conjures the specter of human helplessness. -viral challenges to myths of bodily integrity and human exceptionalism - Covid-19 laid bare not only the deteriorated condition of public health infrastructures, but also how virally intimate everyone is with the people around them, whether friends, neighbors, coworkers, or strangers. Fantasy responds to the discovery, or the reminder, that those folks can leave traces of themselves inside us more readily than we knew. This is viral intimacy without the pleasures of sex. -Indeed, the wish not to think about it—to imagine that the pandemic is a hoax, that it is already over, or that we can “go back to normal” any day now—is, from the point of view of psychoanalysis, just one more sign of unconscious thinking about this virus. The primary response to an unwelcome reality is to reject it.  -the China virus” (as Trump and others did) promotes a fantasy that the epidemic may be curbed via border lockdowns, racial segregation, or anti-Asian violence. Needless to say, racializing a virus contains it in fantasy only: such fantasies generate real effects, just not the ones stipulated.  - Instead, fantasies are modes of thinking at the level of the unconscious that we ignore at our peril. - What I discovered while researching condomless sex at the turn of the millennium was that gay men had not simply forgotten about HIV. Instead, many had incorporated it into their sex lives quite intentionally.  -at the level of fantasy, they were using HIV to form kinship bonds. -My goal at that time was neither to defend nor to denounce bareback subculture, but instead to think alongside it;  - We need to be able to think about difficult material without either praising or condemning it. - what it might mean to live with a virus, rather than only to die from it - The Covid-19 pandemic has furnished a parable about how people navigate, or fail to navigate, viral intimacy. How do we want to live with this coronavirus, with its variants and subvariants, which have entered our world with an alacrity that caught almost everyone off guard? -

[sofi-now]

-the “active power” of enzymes is not something that miraculously sits in the protein’s structure. It is rather something that emerges out of the inherent dynamicity of both the protein and its environment. More specifically, the enzyme forms an energetically coupled system with the water molecules surrounding it, and the substrate. It is the integrated movement of this system that ultimately fuels the catalyzed reaction. -  the power that researchers observe emerges from a dynamic and deeply interconnected system of processes that forms a distributed field of power and action. What is needed, then, is a view that treats change or activity—rather than being—as fundamental. What is needed, Stein argues, is a process ontology. - The “things” we encounter, in all their apparent solidity and stability, are ultimately nothing but slow or stabilized processes. - their permanence is “at best a useful fiction and at worst a misleading delusion. - The process view is in many ways a reversal of the thing-view: whereas in the latter activities presuppose the existence of things, the former states that things cannot do without change or activity. - A key motivation for such a reversal comes from the fact that change is ubiquitous in the world. From the erosion of mountains to the flowing of rivers or even political upheaval, the one thing that is constant in the world is change. - organisms only exist as long as they are metabolically active: an organism has to maintain a constant flow of matter and energy, otherwise it ceases to be the “thing” it is.25 -Becoming is more fundamental than being. -The life cycle is what is basic, and the different stages—the egg, the larva, the adult, etc.—are only time slices of this more fundamental reality. - what infects an organism is not some sort of well-defined stable “thing,” but a temporally extended viral process. - In a cleansing symbiosis, the clownfish feeds on small invertebrates that otherwise have the potential to harm sea anemone, and clownfish fecal matter provides nutrients to the sea anemone. The clownfish is protected from predators by the anemone's stinging cells, to which the clownfish is immune, and the clownfish emits a high-pitched sound that deters butterfly fish, which would otherwise eat the anemone. License: public domain. - we have also seen that some, or maybe all, organisms could not be the processes they are without the viral process running (the example of parasitic wasps is only one of many examples of virus-host mutualisms). -Agential realism is a relational ontology, and an ontology of becoming -well-defined boundaries of the components of a phenomenon are not a given but something that is continuously enacted in ongoing intra-actions. It is not that they simply are determinate; rather they become determinate -Stripping away these manipulations, the protein and the water molecules that surround it turn out to be so closely intertwined that it is not always possible to draw a clear boundary between them. -A virus is not only amorphous juice, but potent juice. -here are different energies that are coupled and colocalized in these objects. And because they are all energy, they are never independent of the larger system they are in. An energetic view of the world is a fundamentally relational view. -In an energetic view, the power of one area of the energy landscape is inextricably linked to the areas surrounding it; it feeds on and is being fed by the context. Viral particles are temporarily stabilized complexes of energy that emerge from the surrounding energy landscape. Their power is coproduced. And as these fragile powerful flows emerge, they also force other processes, such as organisms and social systems, to spend energy, to save energy, and to change shape. Quite literally, power shifts and is shifted by the process of the virus. -Surely, they are somewhat stable phenomena that we can isolate and manipulate in the laboratory. But they are dynamic stabilities that always emerge in relation to other processes. Much like the idea of the permanence of things, the narrative of independent things with “their” powers is nothing but a sometimes-useful-yet-distorting fiction. -the virus in body A is not necessarily the same as the virus in body B, even if it was originally passed on from A to B. - Drugs can help to slow down viral processes in some contexts, and vaccination is a powerful tool to prepare most bodies for the process of infection. But these interventions are only part of the solution. There is a fluidity that underlies the virus-infused world, and once this fluidity is recognized and acknowledged, we can stop thinking about a simple race between us and the virus. The task is no longer to move fast and break things. The task is to understand processes and flows of energies, to understand the creative pluribiotic potential of hostvirus systems and the context they emerge from.

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- thinking in terms of “things” allows researchers to place power in a well-defined location. “Things” are not just individual material entities. They are sites of power and action. This creates clear targets on which science can focus its force. - Where this simple theory becomes difficult in practice is the fact that viruses are highly dynamic. Viruses are the fastest-evolving biological entities, which means that their genetic makeup and structure are constantly changing. As a result, existing drugs or vaccines quickly become outdated; as soon as you know “it” as a thing, the virus has already transformed. - It is a race between us and them. - The real challenge then is not so much to break viruses with speed, but to develop other hopeful narratives that can be more inclusive, and more open in the way they approach the question of how to live with viruses. Narratives are needed that can make sense of the amorphous and relational power of viruses-as-liquids, instead of thing-viruses. - The thing is a locus of action and power. -To change viral behavior, we need to block or remove or change its proteins. This is where thing-talk in virology gathers most of its seductive power: it removes fluidity when it comes to the allocation of power. It reaffirms that there is a stable and fixed seat of viral power. It sets a clear target for intervention that is independent of the viral context. The problem is that this simple script, like the discourse of gene action, is undermined by what is now known about how viruses and proteins behave. -What we see here, then, is a lack of independence. The path a viral “thing” embarks on is not simply set by its parts. The life cycle emerges from a system of interacting processes that goes beyond the virus. A thing-view cannot easily account for what viruses are doing. There is a fluidity to the paths they take (or which they are channeled into) that undermines the simple narratives presented in keywords 3 and 5. -Over recent years the pathogen-narrative has started to change, as more and more scientists began to describe viruses as “good” or as potential “friends. -the heteronomy—rather than the autonomy—of life: the realization of a life cycle is a complex process that depends on several biological activities coming together in a specific manner. -Microbes are constantly evolving entities that are shaped by their interactions with their host and their ecological context.  -Other dualities such as friend/foe, war/peace, or probiosis/antibiosis also turn out to be too narrow.  -the creative potential of living entities that are always becoming through the interactions they are engaged in.  This creative potential or power cannot be easily controlled and subjected to human mastery, as biological systems constantly explore a whole spectrum of relationships (see also keyword 6). There are, consequently, no simple “one-size-fits-all” solutions for intervening in this pluribiotic stream of becoming.20 The manipulability and control promised by the thing-view are likely to fail. -proteins are long chains of chemical building blocks (so-called “amino acids”) that fold into intricate three-dimensional structures. Within these structures, enzymes contain a pocket that has special chemical properties. These pockets, called “active sites”, are special because they offer the chemical reaction an environment in which less energy is required to get from starting point A to product B. The enzyme has power because of its specific microstructure. -

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- In Latin, “virus” means “slimy liquid” or “potent juice.” It’s something that flows, amorphous yet powerful. In contemporary science and mainstream media, these connotations have been largely lost. A virus is now a “thing,” a material particle. It has moved from liquidity to solidity.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/130/491396/viral-things-twelve-keywords/

[sofi-now]

- Maybe Viruses Are More Like Venomous Cone Snails Than Hijackers? - Anthropomorphism and personification of microbial entities in the explanation of virology is a understandable tendency; in this way, viral action is domesticated to the human scale. But maybe it’s time to practice some resolutely non-domesticating conid-amorphism, some conus-centrism, and see what happens if we forge a new avenue for thinking of viruses in terms of venomous cone snails. Conidae is the taxonomic name for the family of gastropods known more colloquially as cone snails, or predatory sea snails. “One of the most successful lineages of marine animals,” the hundreds of species of Conidae are characterized by their use of complex venoms to capture prey.1 Some of these snails prey on worms, some on other snails, and some on fish. In 2015, researchers reported that Conus geographus uses an insulin overdose to disorient and disable its fish prey, releasing the toxin into the water. - Insulin appears to be a component of the nirvana cabal, a toxin combination in these venoms that is released into the water to disorient schools of small fish, making them easier to engulf with the snail’s distended false mouth, which functions as a net. If an entire school of fish simultaneously experiences hypoglycemic shock, this should directly facilitate capture by the predatory snail.2 The released insulin does not affect the snail itself, because its venom insulin mimics fish insulin, not its own molluscan variety. Venomous snails that hunt worms in this fashion make a different insulin mimic, specific to worms. - For example, the first diabetes therapy drug that works by mimicking the glucagon-like peptide hormone (GLP-1) was discovered by analyzing the venom of the Gila monster. - After all, many bacterial symbionts of animals or plants make “eukaryote-like proteins” that mimic their hosts’ molecules in order to participate in their cellular processes, and this is one of the grounds of living together amicably with microbes rather than the interaction necessarily being one of disease. - Another way to put this is that instead of seeing viruses as being like (bad) human actors in a metaphorical sense (as in the hijacker analogy), perhaps there should be more energy and time invested in understanding how viruses, however unwelcome, are literally like humans—their protein kin. This is because we organisms are living together in a range of interlocking relations that range from the commensal to the predatory. - Thus, viruses take up, or converge, toward bits of their hosts. Hosts also diverge to get away from their viruses if their own survival or fitness is compromised by infection. - Viruses, like cone snails, evolve to be more like what sustains them. It is an uncomfortable form of relatedness, this predatory metabolic convergence, but it cannot be denied that it generates amazing patterns of likeness across biological kingdoms without everything having to be descended from the same line of direct genetic inheritance. Where does hormone end and hormone-like begin? If the mimic converges on the original, and places the original under evolutionary pressure to diverge, what is left is a seesawing mirrored relationship of competitive difference and similarity, not an original and a mimic. Even if something has evolved to get away from its mimic, it holds the imprint of that entity’s influence in its difference, like a shadow. In practical terms, looking into cone snails and viral genomes suggests new ways of making drugs, which are human-made mimics that seek to manipulate physiology by augmenting or suppressing the action of the molecule that has been mimicked. - Yet at the same time it is evident that understanding viruses as energetic and metabolic relations—both in the sense of how two or more concepts or objects are related, and in the sense of being an evolutionary relative connected by divergent or convergent change over time—has taken a backseat in research for as many decades as the virus has been a microscopically and genetically identified entity. That is why researchers and scientists, as well as the general public, need to think more about venomous cone snails and less about hijackers, more about the uncomfortable embrace of likeness arising from mimicry and evasion and less about command-and-control systems: because we have all been left collectively unprepared to understand and act on SARS-Cov-2 and its particular metabolic body, much less the ramifying interconnections this sets up between viral dynamics and the social organization of metabolic health.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/130/491398/viruses-are-more-like-cone-snails-than-hijackers/

[sofi-now]

- Whether a virus is living, dead, or undead is the wrong question because its animated copresence is world-making.1 A virus has entered into and shaped all my relations and possible life trajectories since its transmission. - Theorists and politicians alike often deploy the virus as a figure that stands in for agents with fuzzy boundaries who threaten to leak and contaminate: capitalism, communism, populism, immigrants, the underclass, terrorists, media popularity, and digital sabotage. Figuring threats as viral corresponds to a primitive, combative defense mechanism that further activates xenophobic tropes of war and conquest.3 And so we become ensnared in a battle of metaphors that are out of touch with the material relations of viral being and being-with viruses. Who among us has been in an extended relationship with a viral presence? Who has called a virus their kin? - They require the development of an entirely different set of attentions to places of touch and encounter, where human sociality is in symbiosis with more-than-humans, and where contagion and communication are inseparable. - Kinship is often extended as another name for care, implying that with mutual reliance comes reciprocity. But who among us has not been disappointed by our families, both chosen and assigned? Or perhaps we betrayed our own voluntary responsibilities to others, or committed an error of misrecognition when we offered a pact of kinship that was not returned? For example, the house cat caught a garter snake and was playing with its writhing, bleeding body in one of my earliest memories. I rescued the snake carefully from the cat and held its head in my hand, looking into its eyes to ask if it was okay. It snapped open and shut its diamond mouth full of blood, trying to bite me. I was confused by this response to being rescued from death, and promptly released it into the grass, protecting it from the cat’s hunt. A week later, the snake reappeared in the garden, larger and marbled with scabs from its wounds. I was delighted to see it alive and tried to say hello. The snake did not recognize me and slithered away from my hopes for reptile kin. Perhaps its suspicion was that care is another name for control. - I tried to think like a virus, and to find other registers where its expressions could be interpreted. - This porosity and vulnerability to alien cohabitation is unbearable to those who believe themselves to be a singular subject, contained. As philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy argues in Being Singular Plural, “Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence.” - and how capitalism grows into bodies through kinship networks and supply chains of care. - Viruses are my kin. And like any kin, they have both loved and betrayed me. - The lawyer and activist Dean Spade argues that carceral solutions and hypocrisy are the foundation of philanthropic care: “Elite solutions to poverty are always about managing poor people and never about redistributing wealth.” - We are told that this structure is a necessity to produce life-saving medical treatments—will we continue to comply? The source of all this wealth is ours, and with a redirected flow, it could be ours again, for and with each other. If kinship is another name for care and care is another name for control and control is another name for capitalism, then Gilead is also my kin, and I have come here to plan to collectivize my (our) inheritance. The vacancy of the campus indicates that there is room for many. - Accusing conservation environmentalists of messianic delusions by mischaracterizing Gaia as fragile, scientist and cofounder of the Gaia theory James Lovelock wrote, “I see through Gaia a very different reflection. We are bound to be eaten, for it is Gaia’s custom to eat her children.” - The realization came to me that I, as a white teenager infected and disabled by a virus, was not the intended target of this viral figuration, and that it is not Gaia with a cannibal’s appetite that animates pandemics and climate catastrophe, but rather it is wealthy white anxieties that produce necropolitical infrastructures of resource scarcity and organized abandonment. - “When I was told that I’d contracted this virus it didn’t take me long to realize that I’d contracted a diseased society as well.” - It introduced me to being-with others living in deep, queer time, and like the unstable category of queerness that refuses to be known, the virus maintained its mysteries, opacities, and fundamental alterity. The love in being-with the virus taught me the with of recognizing the subtle signs and signals of people living with disabilities and chronic conditions of all kinds, from mental health to trauma to autoimmune disorders to mobility and aging, and how to think about care not as control or forming expectations about how a condition should unfold, or what I think someone else should need—but instead as a practice and process of responsiveness that is an ongoing, agonistic sympoesis. - Though, as I have argued elsewhere, mutual aid and chosen kinships -attend to care work and world-building towards desired horizons, they cannot sufficiently address all aspects of global biomedicine. - Inhuman intimacies and kinships with companion species may take place under coercion and contamination, but the terms of our relations to more-than-human kin is dependent upon our chosen practices of negotiation and resistance to the animacies of capital within our kinship networks. - have been de-skilled in the survivance practices of forming and maintaining kinship networks outside of their own families, as well as eroding them from within. - that it takes hundreds of years for wealth to firmly establish itself within a family.30 He failed to realize that not everyone is positioned to go from selling eggs on the street to being a millionaire. - The anticipatory myth that care can be found in kinship under the pressures of capitalism held me under its spell as I sought every means to survive - Like a beloved, a trauma, a romance, a toxic relation, or a deep wound, the virus will always compose my plural self, even if active viral particles no longer vibrate their presence within my blood. - Kinship is anarchy. Enigmatic and unruly, the social formations that go by this name evade the specifics of structure and definition. In its ideal form, kinship refracts into aspirational horizons: chosen families, loyalties, loves, queer futurities, ancestral conjurings, intuitive magnetisms. Without the burden of form and boundaries, the delivery of expectations cannot be demanded of kinship. And without expectations, there is no disappointment. Right? - Such are the longings for queer horizons and feral kinships that re-world our relations to humans and more-than-humans within the violent ordering of dominant ideologies. Anarchic desires light a path away from most forms of kinship, which are assumed through a default coercion—whether forged through state-recognized family structures, transactional bondage, or through measures taken to survive within limited options. Toxic kinships haunt us through inheritances both material and immaterial.34 Cutting ties with toxic kin is not always possible even if desired, the consequences weighed against the tolerability of ongoing abuse. Severance from kin could result in exile or death, and total self-reliance is a delusion. - Survivance is dependent upon negotiating and being-with toxic relations as much as chosen and desired ones. Furthermore, discerning the toxicities from the nourishments within the very same relationship is a familiar task of anguish. This is the practice of being-with the kinships we do not choose—human and more-than-human. This is the practice of living inside of contradiction and contamination.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/130/491388/kinship-is-anarchy/