Becoming a Virus: Self-Organization of the Masses in Recent Decades

Abstract

According to our usual understanding of a virus, it is a parasite that spreads by forcing the host to make copies it. Cultural analogies to that concept have already given us the notion of a computer virus, a media virus or meme, and ideas as viruses infecting and propagating within the human brain, etc. But could the concept of a virus provide a useful analogy to political and social phenomena? The authors show how such an analogy illuminates the features of modern mass politics that remain obscure as long as political action is thought of in terms of identity, ideology, or private interest. The theoretical basis for regarding social and political phenomena as viruses is that the class of viruses is by nature analogous rather than homologous. This means that scientists can come to different conclusions about the origin of viruses and that several different theories may all be correct. Nevertheless, the term “virus” is meaningful precisely because of the analogy between all the entities called viruses. The core of this analogy is that all viruses use the same set of tricks (artificuim) to realize their essence (potentia). Viruses are parasitic on the organic machinery of other living beings, turning their malfunctions into their own reproductive system. That process also has a cognitive dimension because viruses learn only over succeeding generations. Viruses then live and act not as individual carriers, but only as procreating, mutating, learning multitudes. Their potentia is precisely analogous to the power of the multitudes, which Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have discussed. It is a power which constitutes a new political order and simultaneously impoverishes the present one. The article explains the meaning of this analogy as it applies to the fate of the political and social institutions of late modernity.