The boundaries that constitute us: Parasite, pandemic life, and crises of vulnerability

Abstract

In a very literal sense, a biological organism cannot be alive on its own. I employ key premises in second-order cybernetics in current developments in philosophy of science and posthumanist thought in an attempt to speak upon the state of precarity and lived reality of social and political life during the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. I posit the parasite and the virus as biological and communicational forms which model the impossibility of solipsism in life (be it viral, parasitic, or human). I believe that disrupting a premise of solipsism operates as a central task in an attempt to see and speak of the skein of interrelationships that inform our shared understanding about current events. To mobilize this discussion, I am sensitized to seek the resonances of the film Parasite on topics of radical interrelationality, systemicities within capitalist strictures, and muddled boundaries of biological and political life. The role of socio-economic boundaries affectively felt in the film provides a starting point from which I delve into analogous scientific concepts, including work of cyberneticians Gregory Bateson and Heinz von Foerster, among others, and their respective notions of epistemological responsibility and the circularity of human relations and mutual interaction. This discussion will anchor my attempt to present a symbiosis of concepts that posit the existence of viruses as the existence of boundaries in life forms on earth. Such concepts include Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt especially as it pertains to viral life, Michel Serres’ malleable interpretation of the parasite, and the formal analogies made by cyberneticists between viral ‘consciousness’ and Alan Turing’s machine (self-)organization. I frame these concepts with their potential to offer a phenomenologically resonant and scientifically nuanced understanding into systemic class warfare in mind, as depicted in the film and ramifying throughout.