the paradoxical politics of viral containment

7/28/2019 The Paradoxical Politics of Viral Containment

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Social Text 106 Vol. 29, No. 1 Spring 2011

DOI 10.1215/01642472-1210247 2011 Duke Universi ty Press

Lie is a window o vulnerability. It seems a mistake to close it.

Donna Haraway, The Biopolitics o Postmodern Bodies

How do we contain viral disease? This question seems to obsess us olate. Not yet ten years into the third millennium the world has alreadyweathered a bevy o actual or eared viral epidemics: HIV/AIDS, suddenacute respiratory syndrome (SARS), highly pathogenic avian inuenza(HPAI), and now a novel inuenza A: H1N1 (also known as swine u,or Mexico u, as it was identifed in Israel since, as Israels deputy healthminister, Yakov Litzman, declared, pigs are not kosher1). While thesecontagious matters have received considered and considerable attention,the biomedically oriented responses that they have provoked also raise aew important conceptual questions about what we mean when we reecton how to contain them. Despite maniesting genuine concern or thehealth and well-being o the worlds human populations although per-haps not so much or the birds and pigs with whom we consort these

bioscientifcally inected reactions incorporate a paradox that subtendstheir control antasies: the reason we (i.e., humans) want to contain suchdiseases is precisely because we (i.e., living organisms) already containthem.

However, this overt paradox also indexes yet another, perhaps moreinsidious contradiction, that o the we itsel. Indeed, the politics o

viral containment relentlessly plays upon the contingency o the humanwe. It conceptually and materially conounds our understanding both

The Paradoxical Politics of

Viral Containment; or,

How Scale Undoes Us One and All

Ed Cohen


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16 Cohen The Paradoxical Politics o Viral Containment

o how individuals constitute our collectives and o how we exclude othercollectivities that might not belong to them whether these others

are other individuals, other populations, other humans, other species, orother non-vital entities, such as viruses. In other words, the politics oviral containment oregrounds the tensions that cut across our biopoliti-cal parsings o the world insoar as they inscribe within themselves, andinscribe themselves within, the biological and political phenomena thatwe construe as epidemic disease. Since the end o the eighteenth century,political and medical responses to epidemics have been inormed by, andconversely have inormed, the economic assumptions o industrial capital-ism. The ofcial costs o epidemics are fgured primarily in terms o themonetary value by which they diminish general productivity rather thanthe qualitative experiences o suering and loss they engender. (Mortalityand morbidity statistics weigh on the quantitative side, since they reer topopulations as abstract aggregates and not to illness as a transormative

embodied event.) Even the rudimentary dist inction between epidemics andepizootics that is, between il lness patterns that aict humans as opposedto those that aict all other types o animals assumes simultaneouslythat the kind o lie that humans incorporate essentially diers rom allother living beings (the zoe in epizootics) and that what makes human liespecial is the political character which qualifes it as human in the frstplace (the demos in epidem ic).2 Following rom this etymological distinc-tion, we apprehend that an epidemic becomes an epidemic i and only i itseects traverse the thresholds o the political; otherwise, it is just illness.

Yet our contemporary understanding oepidemicalso carries with it

anothergeopolitical implication: that epidemics spread through space andtime. Throughout most o its twenty-fve-hundredyear existence romancient Greece, which gave us the word as well as the concept, to Europein the mid-nineteenth century, when choleras transit rom India recastthe epidemic as a ull-scale invasion epidemicreerred primarily to acollection o symptoms occurring at a given place over a given period.3 Formore than two millennia, epidemics, in the prevailing Hippocratic sense,reerred to temporal and spatial concatenations o somatic disturbancesthat were episodic: they appeared upon the people (the most literal trans-

lation o epidemic), oten in conjunction with seasonal or environmentalchanges. Even i they seemed to move rom one place to another whichis what made the plague a plague, or example they did not travel romaar, and they did not endure.

Today epidemicsignifes much more broadly. Though we requentlyuse the term metaphorically speaking o epidemics o obesity, o drugs,o fnancial and political corruption since the mid-nineteenth century,epidemics have primarily connoted biopolitical phenomena that collapsetime and space, rendering seemingly stable geopolitical and biological dis-


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tinctions tenuous, i not moot. Hence, in addition to their material eects,epidemics constitute what geographers call scalar narratives, stories

that temporally bind up dierent ways o construing space.4 I we con-sider epidemics as concatenations o biopolitical events that occur withinspace-time, then their scalar articulations inorm our sense o what causesthem, what they are, and how they aect dierent people in dierent ways;urthermore, they do so by making these implications seem natural.5

Using their biological connotations as an alibi (literally an else-where, an other space), epidemics enold their economic, political, techno-logical, and bioscientifc signifcance within themselves and jump scales,to use Neil Smiths phrase, by jumping among discourses (molecular,

genetic, epidemiological, sociological, economic, meteorological, agro-

nomic, etc.).6 Concomitantly, because they compose narratives, these

spatial and discursive dynamics assume temporal shapes that articulaterelations o coordination and subordination among them, thereby serving

as quasi-natural explanations or them.7

From this perspective, epidemicsappear to take place naturally that is, their occurrence constitutes atemporal mode o emplacement which seems beyond or outside humanagency.8 However, i we actually begin to appreciate this quasi-naturalappearance as appearance, epidemics can also remind us that the ways inwhich we emplotourselves in the world, both spatial ly and temporally, arein act fctions in the strong, abricating sense o the term.9

1. Particularity; or, How Viruses Come to Matter

The epidemic emplotments that seem to concern us most these days areviral. Indeed, these viral narratives challenge us precisely because theyseem to revise, or rewrite, the ways we like to make sense o ourselvesas agents in the world. For example, in her ofcial statement declaring thestart o the 2009 inuenza A pandemic, Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general o the World Health Organization, averred: The virus writes therules and this one, like all inuenza viruses, can change the rules withoutrhyme or reason, at any time.10 According to Chans declaration, virusesappear as authors, as agents; they govern us, they rule, they reign; theyare fckle, whimsical, unreasonable, inconstant; they veer rom one placeto another; they shit shapes. Like all vulnerable subjects, we rightullyear such capricious sovereigns because we cannot predict their behaviorstoward us. Thus we make up stories about them in order to encompasstheir peculiarities. According to these narratives, viruses are peculiar

kinds o beings in part because they are particular.The etymology oparticulargives some sense o the complex ques-

tions that viral ontology enolds: Particulars are not universals; they areodd, bizarre, and still amiliar; they are individuals and yet they are parts;


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they are partial in al l possible senses.11 Moreover, i viruses are particu-lar, it is partly because they are particles. Their particular and part iculatenature straddles the cusp o lie itsel, conusing the very notion o whatlivingmeans.12 Indeed, their indeterminate animate/inanimate existencebespeaks a curious historical process that disturbs much evolutionary

thinking: which came frst, the virus or its host?13 For the truly particularthing about viruses, what makes them actually and not just fgurativelypartial, is that viruses cannot reproduce themselves by themselves. Hence,when we reer to viruses circulating in the world, as Chan did in declar-ing the opening o the 2009 inuenza A pandemic, we really speak aboutproducts o living organisms which now exceed those vital contexts, hav-ing become ree rom them sometimes by k ill ing them to circulateamong one and all.

Following contemporary scientifc defnitions (the current fctionsthat science uses to produce its acts), viruses exist only insoar as they

have successully spurred a cellular organism to commit some o its ownresources and processes to producing more copies o the original.14Technically speaking, virus describes a small quantity o genetic mate-rial, either RNA or DNA (which can appear in single or double strands),enclosed within a protein coat, and sometimes surrounded by a lipid

envelope. Viruses appear to exist everywhere on Earth and may in actconstitute the most abundant biological entities on the planet.15 Fur-thermore, they do not by and large trouble us. As Luis Villarreal writes:Most known viruses are persistent and innocuous, not pathogenic. Theytake up residence in cells, where they may remain dormant or long periods

or take advantage o the cells replication apparatus to reproduce at a slowand steady rate.16 As or the viruses we dont know about which arelegion well, we just dont know. The omnipresence o viruses, coupledwith their general inoensiveness and their minuscule scale, makes themeasy to overlook. They exist almost like genetic background radiation, notvery interesting until you begin to ocus on it in which case you mightdiscover that it retains an echo o the Big Bang.17

Not much is certa in about the role viruses play in the evolutionaryscheme o things, though theories abound.18 What we do know suggests

that, as Villarreal puts it, Viruses matter to lie. They are the constantlychanging boundary between the worlds o biology and biochemistry.19 Asthe shiting border between these domains, viruses necessarily belong toboth. They are what Donna Haraway would call tricksters,20 which isanother way o saying they might in act be transboundary in nature.21Given their amazing alchemical abilities, viruses seem to perorm as mix-masters o the evolutionary dance, sampling, combining, and remaster-ing genetic records in signifcant i little understood ways: Viruses notonly move genetic material rom one organism to another but rom one


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ecosystem to another. . . . [V]iruses can move throughout the world andcontribute to a global genetic pool.22 Furthermore, because viruses mustpart icipate in the cellular processes o organisms in order to replicate, theirexistence testifes to the partiality o defnitions that localize lie withinbounded membranes and against the world (as immunological theoriesusually suppose).23

Many conjectures about how viruses unction in the web o lie ocuson their capacity to link cellular organisms containing dist inct genomes byinvading or inecting them. In so doing, viruses modiy organisms bycommingl ing bits o viral genomes within them. This promiscuous capac-ity leads some researchers to hypothesize that cellular evolution depends onviral evolution such that we would not even be without them. Despitethis possible ontological and biological dependence, humans still largelyretain the prejudice that we, and not they, rule the roost. Their particularitymerely seems to butt up against our individuality rom time to time each

time we get a cold, or example. For no matter why they are here or whatthey ult imately do, what mostly interests us (humans) about viruses at least as ar as our current active fctions a llow us to appreciate them isthat when some o them replicate in our cells they catalyze deleteriousbiological and biochemical eects (a ratherpartialconcern, to be sure).

This virulence that we associate with certain viral part icles primarilyocuses our attention on viruses as inectious agents. Indeed, that is how wecame to know about them in the frst place. The eects that viruses pro-voke in humans, animals, and ecosystems have persisted probably as longas there have been humans, animals, and ecosystems or possibly even

beore. Yet until the very end o the nineteenth century the existence oviruses qua viruses was unimaginable. Beore then, virus reerred ambigu-ously either to a substance produced in the body by a disease . . . [or to]any agent causing an inectious disease.24 However, over the last decadeso the nineteenth century, the germ theory o disease reocused thisindeterminate meaning ovirus when it introduced the microbe into theworld as a new biological andpolitical actor.25 As bacteria were increasinglyseen to cause many o the inectious diseases a icting humans, especial lyepidemic diseases, the generic sense ovirus ceded some o its signifcance

to them. Later, ater it became technically possible to flter bacteria out osolutions known to transmit inections, bioscientists concluded that evensmaller disease-precipitating entities probably existed, despite their havingonly indirect evidence or them.26

Throughout the next several decades, these flterable viruses pro-voked intense philosophical and experimental speculation, culminatingin 1939 when the Tomato Mosaic Virus was visualized using an electronmicroscope, thereby confrming the particulate existence o the virus as avirus. Subsequently, virology like the viruses which defne its nominal


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heralded identifcation o choleras comma bacillus (1884), he adaptedthis same metaphor to the study o cholera (an epidemic which had alreadylong since been imagined as a oreign invasion) and then metonymicallytermed the parasit ic cholera bacterium itsel an invader. In so doing, heelided the dierence between parasite and invader, constituting themas two sides o the same coin.30 Not coincidentally, this association arosein a text that explicitly took as its point o departure the struggle againstepidemics and indeed in the very text in which Koch introduced hisamous postulates or establishing disease causality. With this implicitscalar connection, Koch articulated cholera bacteria and cholera epidemicsas belonging to the same narrative. He thereby inoculated his metaphoricequivalence between parasite and invader (or alternately, enemy) intoan enduring bio-logic o epidemic containment which continues to under-write contemporary biomedical rationales. Despite the act that Koch didnot bother to motivate the logic underlying the associations he invoked

nor to explain conclusively how parasitism, disease, and epidemics mightcoincide, the notion ourished and I am loath to say became highlyinectious.

In the early 1880s, Louis Pasteur eshed out Kochs init ial parasiticintimations, providing some important missing details. Drawing on a well-known analogy (derived rom humoral medicine) between ermentationand disease, as well as on his own work concerning ermentation in wineand beer, Pasteur surmised that microorganisms cause inectious diseasejust as yeast causes ermentation. Presuming that a biotic agent mustcatalyze the chemical changes which transorm organic matter rom one

qualitative state to another, Pasteur reasoned that the biochemical trans-ormations known as disease must also require a biotic agent.31 Hence, inPasteurs bio-logic, the living germ that converts smashed grapes intovintage wine provides the analogue or the deadly germ that transormsliving bodies into putreying corpses.32 Moreover, he inerred, since dur-ing their own metabolic processes these germs consume the matter othe milieu in which they live, diseases must arise because the parasiticmicrobes deplete nutrients essential to the host organisms vital ity. Whilethis idea revises and recapitulates an earlier notion o disease causality

ound in humoral medicine, it also imports the biopolitical assumptionderived rom Pasteurs riend and mentor Claude Bernard, who intro-duced the seminal idea that an organisms milieu intrieurconstitutes itsproper milieu (literally, its own milieu and, conversely, that whichit owns).33 In depriving the host o its own proper and essential material,the parasitic microbe thus naturally violates liberalisms most sacredprecept (i.e., that one owns ones body as ones property).34 Disregardingthe bodys propriety by purloining its essential property like the badguest that violates its host, as we wil l consider below the germ materially


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2 2 Cohen The Paradoxical Politics o Viral Containment

perturbs the quasi-natural basis or liberal personhood (i.e., the bodydefnes a natural metonym or the person35). Hence, insoar as it comesto represent the virulent agent o epidemic-causing inectious diseases,which themselves necessarily enold the biological within the political, themicroscopic parasite not only biologically but also politically threatensthe organisms economy. As Pasteur exclaimed: The truly real novelty

o the preceding observations, the novelty which provides much to reecton about the nature o viruses [la nature des viruses], is that here it is a ques-tion o an illness whose virulent agent is a microscopic parasite, a livingbeing, which can be cultivated outside the economy.36

The Paradoxical Parasite; or, The Antinomies of Viral Life

Historically speaking, then, viruses were parasites beore they were

viruses. Or, to put it slightly less anachronistically, by the time sciencedeclared that viruses exist and oment disease, parasitism already domi-nated the explanatory feld. Yet even though we have now largely orgot-ten it, parasitism does not in act represent a natural relationship, sincethe host/parasite relation derives rom political theories dating back toancient Rome. Only in the eighteenth century did it begin to be appliedmetaphorically to the biological domain. Moreover, the relation o hostand parasite necessarily depends on the complicated notion o host

itsel. The Latin eponym or host, hospes, means guest, host, and stranger;it thereore constitutes an antithetical word, a word that means both onething and its opposite. Thus, in the terms used in this essay, host actu-

ally contains a paradox (and, reciprocal ly, then so does parasite butmore on that in a moment).

The incomparable linguist Emile Benveniste has argued that the ten-sion internal to hostreveals itsel in the words historical trajectory. He holdsthat hostderives rom two roots. One connotes master o the house (ina male-gendered sort o way), which then evolved into a notion o masteryo ones sel a development that testifes to a specifc political situation:There must be a circle o persons subordinated to a central personagewho assumes the personal ity and complete identity o the group to suchan extent that he is its summation: in his own person he is its incarna-tion.37 The other root stems rom a word meaning stranger, but in avery specifc sense:

A hostis is not a stranger in general . . . hostis is the stranger in so ar as he

is recognized as enjoying equal r ights to those o Roman citizens. This rec-

ognition o rights implies a certain reciprocity and supposes an agreement

or compact. Not all non-Romans are called hostis. A bond o equality and

reciprocity is established between this particular stranger and the citizen o

Rome, a act which may lead to a precise notion o hospitality. From this


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point o view hostis will signiy he who stands in a compensatory relation-

ship and this is precisely the oundation o the institution o hospitality. 38

The idea o host uses two disparate kinds o relations: Host as thecontainer o all the particulars, their political and religious incarnations(hence the Christian meaning ohostas holy toast), and, conversely, host

as the one who enters into relations o reciprocity, or git giving, with theother, thereby evincing hospitality rather than hostility.39 Host then

encompasses both a sel-relation that totalizes the particularities o a

multiplicity (as the ather does the patriarchal household or Christ doesthe Church) and a relation to that which exists outside the sel but towhich one cannot notenter into relation without negating onesel. Fromthis conuence, the logic o hospitality implies that the good other is theguest who reafrms the hosts property in himsel and as his sel,while the bad other is the parasite who abuses this propriety this

proper relation o the sel to itsel and who thus quickly evolves intothe enemy.40

The paradox o the parasite has incited at least two important phi lo-sophical responses that bear on the question o viral containment. Thefrst rom Jacques Derrida:

It should be remembered that the parasite is by defnition never simply

external, never something that can be simply excluded rom or kept outside

o the body proper, shut out rom the amilial table or house. Parasitism

takes place when the parasite (called thus by the owner, jealously deending

his own oikos) comes to live o the lie o the body in which it resides and

when reciprocally, the host incorporates the parasite to an extent, willy nilly

oering it hospitality: providing it with a place. The parasite then takes

place. And at bottom whatever violently takes place or occupies a site is

always somethingo a parasite.41

In Derridas gloss, the parasite disturbs the promise o the proper, thebounded, the inside as opposed to the outside. It calls or the host to deendthe oikos, his vital economy. An abusive guest, the parasite is undesirableprecisely insoar as what the host most desires is clarity o borders, a cer-

tain distinction between boundedness and unboundedness (the very onethat viral inection threatens to disrupt). What the parasite reveals is thatthe lie o the body also belongs to lie in general, which is why the para-site can eat both with us (as guest, as commensal) and rom us (the literalmeaning oparasite). In so doing, the parasite conronts us with the actthat lie does not properly take place within a proper body.

Consequently, the parasite reveals that the body itsel does not existas a proper and proprietary given that is, as a natural act but ratherincorporates a scalar narrative, a fction, that emplots us within what we


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call a lie by emplotting us within it. What we name as the body situ-ates us within a lie story that binds up space and time, suturing us to ourselves as the jealous proprietors o our much coveted vital property. Theparasite thereore addresses us as an enemy only insoar as we identiythe body and identiy with the body as the essential psychological/political/biological metonym or our lie. By perturbing this putatively natural

metonymy, parasites reveal the underlying paradox o modern politicalontology which perhaps explains in part why viral epidemics seem totrouble us biologically, politically, economically, and psychologically.

Michel Serres extends the paradox o the parasite even urther: Theparasitic relation is intersubjective. It is the atomic orm o our relations.Let us try to ace it head on, like death, like the sun. We are all attacked,together. . . . We parasite each other and live amidst parasites. Which ismore or less a way o saying they constitute our environment.42 In his as-cinating monograph, Parasite, Serres meditates on this eponymous fgure

in order to undo the bio-logics that underwrite Western polit ical ontology.By fguring the parasit ic relation as universal, as the atomic orm o ourrelations, Serres displaces the atomized individual rom the center oboth our biological and political schemas or even more signifcantly, heillustrates that the ormer does not naturally imply the latter. His insis-tence that we parasite each other, or indeed that man is the universalparasite, displaces the hierarchy o value which host/parasite implies inpart because the parasite provokes a paradox: This is the paradox o theparasite. It is very simple but has great import. It is necessary or the rela-tion and ineluctable by the overturning o the orce that tries to exclude

it. But this relation is nonrelation. The parasite is being and nonbeing atthe same time.43 For Serres, the parasites universality belies the spirals onegation entailed by dialectical thinking. The parasites paradox cannot bereduced, transcended, or overcome. It serves as the condition o possibilityor relation, which the parasite simultaneously incorporates and disturbs,precisely because relation is both necessary and disturbing. Living entailsvulnerabil ity as Haraway put it, lie is a window o vulnerability44 so we might say that through the parasite we personiy this paradox. Yetwhen bioscience names the parasite as the cause o inectious diseases,

it excludes or orgets the parasites paradoxical nature, which allows it toexclude or orget those relations especially the political and economicones that also rank among the eective causes o epidemic disease.

When scientists say that viruses are obligate parasites, then whatare they saying exactly? The idea that a parasite is obligated to its parasit-ism somewhat undermines the premise o the parasite, since its very naturerequires it to be the bad guest. Indeed i it has no lie apart rom the liethat it manipulates through the hosts cellular processes, then it may notbe either a good or a bad guest at all, but something more like a symbiont.


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2 5Social Text 106 Spring 2011

The idea that as parasites viruses act within cells to their hosts detri-ment also belies the act that al l viral activity is cellular activity albeitdirected to particular ends. Furthermore, we honestly dont know thatviruses only aect cells deleteriously, since some evidence suggests other-wise.45 In any case, viruses only act (as ar as we know) indirectly byacting on the actions o cells.

Yet viral virulence proposes a scalar narrative that coners agencyon a virus as an originator o intracellular changes that turn a cellsproper processes away rom their pre-scripted aims by oering them anew script quite literal ly. Indeed, the notion that viral DNA or RNAoverwrites or overcodes a cells original patterns o transorming matterand energy and redirects them to its own ends implies an explicit, albeitwayward, authority on the viruss part. However, as critiques o DNAreductionism have made clear, cells produce and reproduce; DNA doesnot.46 What this suggests is that the question o viral agency is probably

somewhat more paradoxical than the obligate parasite model implies. Fori viral activity actual ly names the ways cells unction, albeit to viral ends,it may require us to revise our oppositions o subjects and objects, or hostsand parasites, to encompass the multiple levels o actors and actions thatcoincide within this cellular nexus.

To account or this conusing situation, some researchers have

recently proposed the idea that when viruses begin to modulate cellularprocesses to their own purposes (i such a concept even applies), they ormviral actories that induce a recruitment o organelles, usually to theperinuclear area, and build a new structure that unctions in viral replica-

tion, assembly, or both.47 The notion o viral actories introduces a bit o atwist to the parasitic narrative: the bad guest now can become the bad capi-talist who organizes a hosti le takeover and exploits indigenous produc-tion systems. Despite these potential metaphoric inelicities, the image othe viral actory does nevertheless introduce a new set o possibilities orimagining how viruses exist, or at least or indicating that viral ontologiescohabit with and within political ontologies and that decisions aboutone constitute decisions about the other. Furthermore, it suggests thatorganisms might be both corporeal and corporate, that their singularities

might entail multiplicities working together, that the one and the many maycoincide: The virus actory comprises the structures that are involved inthe replication and assembly o various viruses in the inected cells. Theyconsist o complex assemblages o viral elements combined with recruitedcell components, in particular membrane ragments.48

The complex assemblages that vira l actories articulate maniest adierent style o parasitism than the viral invader. (Although i we use thetwo we might end up with something like the virus as a terrorist assem-blage, which does seem to capture the ethos o much current discussion


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about emerging viral diseases.)49 In their actories, viruses organize andreorganize cellular production and reproduction. They introduce new

production plans; they combine cellular apparatuses; they recruit cellcomponents. What they do not do is appropriate the hosts property bymaking it their own. Instead, at the cellular and molecular levels, theyconuse the categories o property, o ownership, o propriety, o sel andother. Indeed, perhaps what we have come to call the virus, the obligateparasite that was a parasite beore it was a virus, takes the place o thisconusion. Or maybe it is the place that this conusion takes. Given howmuch remains obscure about viral existence, we might need to recognizethat the virus, whatever it may be, acts as a political supplement toour ways o imagining living beings as individuated entities.

In its ofcial guise as obligate parasite, the virus natural ly shores upthe contradictions between the one and the many that epidemic diseasesnecessarily disclose by flling the space o this contradict ion with its par-

ticularity. As Jacques Derrida asks: Whether viewed rom close up orrom ar away, does not everything that comes to aect the proper or theliteral have the orm o a virus (neither dead nor alive, neither human norreappropriable by the proper o man, nor generally subjectivable)?50The orm o the virus does not here reer to the viron with its proteincapsid and lipid envelope in act in this instance Derrida reers primar-ily to computer viruses (even while recognizing the AIDS virus as itscontagious cognate). Rather, he suggests that the viral orm derives romand plays on the eects (or aects) it induces in the place o the proper orthe literal. It takes place, jumping across dierent scales and discourses

rom hardware, to sotware, and to wetware, whenever and wherever pro-priety or l iteralness tremble. Conversely, anything that rends the properhuman scale especially insoar as the human appears to take placeproperly within the scalar narrative we call the body can assume theviral orm. This is one reason the virus could be a parasite beore it was avirus: it was also aorm beore it was a virus.

Insoar as it is a orm, the orm o the virus contains the orm o aparadox the orm o anything material does. Since Aristotle introducedhylomorphism into philosophy, the being o the world has been commonly

parsed into orm and matter. A thing is what it is, say a brick, because it ismade out o something (mud) and assumes a particular orm (a recti linearmold). The ormer represents its potentiality and the latter its actuality. Yetas Gilbert Simondons wonderul crit ique o hylomorphic duality indicates,this parsing completely ignores at least one other essential ingredient, onethat this account conceals as inessential: the energy rom the kiln neededto enable the mud in the recti linear mold to assume the orm o the brick.51Or, in Simondons terms, it neglects the preindividual in which orm,matter, and energy preexist in the system.52 I you tell a story in terms o


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bricks, then you can orget the energy as well as the labor as well asthe place that the mud comes rom as well as the other animals and plantsdisplaced by the kiln and the aggregations o humans needed to run thekiln as well as the trees or the coal needed to fre the kiln . . . but you getmy drit. In terms o telling a scalar narrative, the ormal paradox acilitatesa high degree o truncation. It contains within itsel more than it says. Itallows you to stop the plot when you get to the unit that you deem mostessential, thereby oreclosing the need to consider whether this essentialorm is truly essential precisely because the unrecognized inessentialsecreted within it disappears.

O course in Derridas view, nothing is essential ly essential, and thatis why he says deconstruction happens, in the way that shit happens orindeed in the way that we might say that viruses happen.53 The paradoxo orm is that i it applies to matter, that is, i it has been materialized oractualized, then it contains at least two incommensurable modes that take

place together only because other essential dimensions or scales i youpreer remain unappreciated. However, this lack o appreciation does notreveal a natural or inevitable absence o appreciation, but instead revealsa decision, or an ongoing process o deciding, about where value lies.

The vira l orm o the story, or the story about the viral orm, cutsthe telling short. It decides which agents are essential and which are not.It enables paradoxes to remain unappreciated as paradoxes and hence

not to trouble the narratives coherence. In other words, the paradoxicalorm enables the truncated viral narrative to make sense, to produce andreproduce meaning, to conceive the world in its image.

Coda: Incorporating Viral Paradox

When we tell the story o emerging inectious diseases in terms o viruses,we leave out a lot: especially all the ways we are in the world and

the world is in us. From the viruses perspective, we (humans) are notessentially dierent rom any other cellular beings. Indeed, the problemthat zoonotic diseases name is precisely viruses indierence to this di-erence in which we are so invested. Moreover, since viruses are cellularproducts, through the virus we (cellular beings, including the humankind) are actually and actively involved in each other as the popularshorthand terms swine u and avian u both indicate and obscure. In act,rom an evolutionary perspective, this involvement may coner an adap-tive resource or uture speciation. Unbeknownst to us, our utures maydepend on the ways we learn to live with the viruses that take place withinand among us though o course the reerent o this us would thenbe up or grabs. Yet this coincidence, literally a co-incidence, troubles usboth physiologically and conceptually. I as humans we suppose ourselves


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to be distinct, then the emergence o new viral agents, especially thosethat can jump species and scales, poses multiple threats. Unortunately,what makes this emergence so interesting to us (humans) is not that itchallenges us to think about the complex scalar connections through

which we (living organisms) relentlessly weave ourselves into the world,let alone to reect on the ways our political and economic values deeplyinorm and oten deorm our vital interests. Instead, our current

interest in emerging viral diseases demonstrates that even as we mightacknowledge an urgent need to recognize the myriad ways the world hailsus and entails us, we continue to maintain our own investment in humanparticularity as i it were a natural act.

The recent concern about the pandemic o swine u provides

an excellent case in point with which to conclude this essays circuitousviral meditation. Since the outbreak o the novel inuenza A (H1N1) frstclaimed public attention in April 2009, both medical and popular atten-

tion has ocused on the question o its origins. The headline in Sciencedeclared: Out o Mexico? Scientists Ponder Swine Flus Origins,54 sincethe correlation between origin and containment seemed sel-sufcient.However, soon ater it was frst localized in Mexico, it quickly becameapparent that models o inuenza pandemics have shown that its nearlyimpossible or a country to contain an out break o a new inuenza virus.You can see that happened in the United States, says [epidemiologistMauricio] Hernndez-vila. They even ound the virus beore we did andthey were not able to contain it. 55 But an uncontainable virus threatensto reveal the paradox that the virus itsel contains, so a new container

presented itsel: the pig.In the biomedical literature on the origins o the novel inuenza

A virus, pigs emerge as to use the highly technical terms sheltersand mixing vessels.56 Here the generic pig, or swine host, fgures asa human-animal-ecosystem interace incarnate. Despite the evidence ormultiple reassortment events which may have transpired on dierentcontinents, the pig hypothetically appears to contain the viruss origin.Because the pig cohabits both with humans and with birds though withneither by its own choice, we might note it provides a ertile matrix or

these animals viral extrusions to commingle. A virtual incubator on thehoo or avian, swine, and human inuenza genomes, the porcine vesselthus appears as a natural nexus rom which a new and potentially deadlyinuenza A agent emerges.

O course, the savvy media did recognize that pigs dont y, so theyquickly identifed a possible mediating entity: a Smithfeld Foods acilityin Veracruz, Mexico. The corporation quickly issued a denial on 20 May2009, on the industry Web site, MeatInternational.com,57 and ater another


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round or two o accusations and demurrals, the issue dropped, since interms o the origin question the mystery seemed pretty much solved. I notthis eed lot then another one; i not this pig then that one, since the virusis what most interests us. However, this version o the story occludes a ewsignifcant acts: or example, pigs do not naturally inhabit eedlots orbarnyards or that matter. And eedlots do not constitute the only way toraise pigs, though they do provide excellent ways to breed new bacteria andviruses. How might the relations among pig actories, virus actories, andother agribusinesses commingle? For example, Michael Pollan has recentlyelucidated the connections among the corn industry, cattle eedlots, bigpharma, and the development o antibiotic-resistant bacteria (which evolvein response to the antibiotics given to cattle because they do not naturallydigest corn).58 Might not the pig be subject to similar pressures? Moreover,why was the pig domesticated, and how does this porcine history contributeto its evolution as a mixing vessel? Might we not need to inquire into

how the pig has inormed the movements o peoples and technologies, inthe ways that Sarah Franklin has recently done or sheep?59 Might we notwant to consider, as Susan Squier has, how the shit to the industrial arm-ing o chickens rom home breeding mostly by women (the source o thecolloquial egg money) has created not just more and cheaper chickennuggets but also opportunities or rapid viral transormations?60

Asking such questions does not mean that viruses dont matter. Aucontraire. However, i we do not ask these kinds o questions, the ormthat we ascribe to the viruses materiality too oten enables us to orget,or example, that pigs do not y though o course humans have learned

to, prosthetically, and we carry viruses with us. In order to apprehend theparadoxical politics o viral containment, we need to appreciate that weare paradoxical beings, along with all other lie orms. Our vulnerabilityand our vitality coexist. I we try to negate the ormer, we are likely tonegate the latter, as the history o smallpox suggests: ater all, how did thefrst naturally occurring viral disease that humans eliminated becomethe most deadly bioweapon in existence? How we think about viruses andhow we think about our vulnerability matter to each other. Insoar as weancy ourselves as autonomous individuals, aggregated into populations,

we misrecognize a ew essential acts as inessential. Population thinking isfne or answering some quest ions, but not all and probably not the mostvital ones since population only calculates in terms o whole numbers.61Population cannot encompass gradations and relations between units;

however, lie can and does all the time. What the viruss trickster nature,its paradoxical orm, its particularity can remind us o is that such grada-tions and relations truly matter. In other words, we need to think o vira lepidemics in terms o how we narrate scale, since that is how we account


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or the ways in which living takes place in time. Whatever our politicaland economic ideologies try to tell us, then, the paradoxical politics oviral containment says otherwise: or what the viruses show and whatwe might need to learn is that scale undoes us one and al l.

Notes1. Associated Press, Israel Must Call New Disease Mexico Flu, as Swine

Unkosher, Haaretz, 27 April 2009, www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1081515.html.2. As Giorgio Agamben underscores in his essay Special Being, in Proa-

nations, trans. Je Fort (New York: Zone, 2007), such specialness leans on thetension internal to Aristotelian defnitions o species (eidos). Following medievalreections on the correspondences between image and essence, Agamben holds

that special being concerns one whose essence coincides with its being given to beseen, with its aspect. . . . [However] between the perception o the image and therecognit ion o onesel in it, there is a gap, which medieval poets called love. . . . Thespecies is nothing other than the tension, the love with which each being desires

itsel, desires to persevere in its own being. . . . In this sense, special being is thebeing that is common or generic, and this is something like the image or the ace ohumanity (5758).

3. Paul Martin and Estelle Martin-Granel, 2,500Year Evolution o the

Term Epidemic, Emerging Inectious Disease 12 (2006): 97680.4. Erik Swyngedouw, Neither Global nor Local: Glocalization and the Poli-

tics o Scale, in Spaces o Globalization: Reasserting the Power o the Local, ed. KevinCox (New York: Guilord, 1992), 137166. As Swyngedouw explains:

These scalar narratives provide the metaphors or the construction o

explanatory discourses. . . . [The] multiplicity o scalar levels and perspec-tives also suggest that scale is neither an ontologically given and a priori defn-

able geographical territory nor a politically neutral discursive strategy in theconstruction o narratives. Scale, both in its metaphorical use and materialconstruction, is highly uid and dynamic, and both processes and eects caneasily move rom scale to scale and aect dierent people in dierent ways,depending on the scale at which the processes operate. Similarly, dierent sca-lar narratives indicate dierent causal moments and highlight dierent powergeometries in explaining such events. (Neither Global nor Local, 13940)5. An explicit interest in scale also appears within recent scientifc thinking

about epidemics, especially in the new subfelds o landscape epidemiology andphylogeography; however, as in Swyngedouw, their analysis assumes that scaleis . . . an ontologically given and a priori defnable geographical territory . . . [and]a politically neutral discursive strategy precisely the opposite sense that criticalgeographers invoke. See, or example, the articles cited in the review essay by ArchieClements and Dirk Peier, Emerging Viral Zoonoses: Frameworks or Spatial andSpatiotemporal Risk Assessment and Resource Planning, Veterinary Journal182(2009): 2130.

6. Neil Smith, Homeless/Global: Scaling Places, in Mapping the Futures:Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird et al. (London: Routledge, 1993), 90.

7. We might also remember that explain rom the Latin ex- + planus,meaning to atten or unold itsel embeds a spatial trope to evoke the process omaking visible or comprehensible.


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8. For a discussion o how scale takes place, see Andrew Jonas, The ScalePolitics o Spatiality, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12 (1994): 262.For how nature or indeed the metaphysics o nature constitutes the eectivelimits o the political, see Bruno Latour, Politics o Nature, trans. Catherine Porter(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

9. See Bruno Latour, Sur le culte modern des dieux aitiches (Paris: ditionsLa Dcouverte, 2009). In Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Maniesto: Dogs,People, and Signifcant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), Harawayreminds us that act and fction decline the Latin verb meaning to make or do, withthe ormer deriving rom the past participle and the latter rom the present parti-ciple:

Etymologically, acts reer to perormance, action, deeds done eats, in short.A act is a past participle, a thing done, fxed, shown, perormed, accom-

plished. . . . Fiction, etymologically, is very close, but diers by a part o

speech and tense. Like acts, fction reers to action, but fction is about theact o ashioning, orming, inventing, as well as eigning or einting. Drawnrom a present participle, fction is in process and still at stake, not fnished,sti ll prone to alling aoul o acts, but also liable to showing something we do

not yet know to be true, but will know. (Companion Species, 1920)10. Margaret Chan, Statement to the Press by WHO Director- General Dr

Margaret Chan 11 June 2009, World Health Organization, www.who.int/mediacentre/news/statements/2009/h1n1_pandemic_phase6_20090611/en/index.html (accessed7 November 2010).

11. Oxord English Dictionary, s.v. part icular. The etymology given is as ol-lows: limited to a part, not universal (c1265), distinguished rom other individualsor elements, special (c1265), concerning only an individual, private (c1300), relat-ing to the property or characteristic o an individual (1314), turned in on onesel,egotistic (end o 14th cent.), odd, bizarre (1549), amiliar (1559) and its etymonpost-classical Latin particularis : o or concerning a part, particular, not universal

(4th cent., especially in logic), partial (6th cent.), separate, individual (c1197, 1459in British sources), detailed (1242, c1564 in British sources).12. For the two sides o the argument, see David Moreira and Purifcation

Lopez-Garcia, Ten Reasons to Exclude Viruses rom the Tree o Lie, NatureReviews: Microbiology 7 (2009): 30611; and Jean-Michel Claverie, Viruses TakeCenter Stage in Cellular Evolution, Genome Biology 7 (2006): 110.

13. On the role that viruses have played in origin o lie debates, see ScottPodolsky, The Role o the Virus in Origin-o-Lie Theorizing, Journal of theHistory o Biology 29 (1996): 79126. Conversely, the evolutionary orce o virusescontributes to the debates about whether they are alive or not. See, or example,Claverie: The origins o viruses are shrouded in mystery, but advances in genom-ics and the discovery o highly complex giant DNA viruses have stimulated newhypotheses that DNA viruses were involved in the emergence o the eukaryotic

cell nucleus, and that they are worthy o being considered as living organisms

(Viruses, abstract, 110). Viruses also fgure centrally in debates about the pre-cedence o RNA over DNA in evolutionary development; see, or example, PatrickForterre, The Two Ages o the RNA World, and the Transition to the DNA World:A Story o Viruses and Cells, Biochemie 81 (2005): 793803.

14. Although, given the evolutionary conundrum, the paradoxical logic o

original and copy seems even more troubling here than in Judith Butlers origi-

nal exposition, which suggested that originals become original only atera copy


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appears. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion o Identity (NewYork: Routledge, 1990), 31.

15. Robert A. Edwards and Forest Rohwer, Viral Metagenomics, NatureReviews: Microbiology 3 (2005): 504. Similar claims are made in marine biology,where, or example, Curtis Suttle claims: Without doubt, viruses are the most

abundant and genetically diverse lie orms in the ocean (Viruses in the Sea,Nature 437 [2005]: 356); Andrew Lang et al. afrm: Although viruses cannot

replicate autonomously, they outnumber all orms o cellular lie in the oceans byroughly an order o magnitude (RNA Viruses in the Sea, Federation o European

Microbiological Societies Microbiological Reviews 33 [2009]: 295).16. Luis Villarreal, Are Viruses Alive? Scientifc American 291 (2004): 105.17. Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, a orm o electromagnetic

radiation that flls the universe, corroborates the inationary Big Bang theory. For anintroduction, see the Wikipedia entry, Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Cosmic_microwave_background_radiation (accessed 1August 2009). The model o the Big Bang has also been applied recently to evolu-tion generally (see Eugene Koonin, The Biological Big Bang Model or the MajorTransitions in Evolution, Biology Direct 2 [2007], at www.biology-direct.com/

content/2/1/21/ [accessed 7 November 2010]) and to viruses specifcally (see EugeneKoonin et al., The Big Bang o Picorna-like Virus Evolution Antedates the Radia-tion o Eukaryotic Supergroup, Nature Reviews: Microbiology 6 [2008]: 92539).

18. For an introduction to the topic, see the essays collected in Esteban

Domingo, Colin R. Parrish, and John J. Holland, eds., Origin and Evolution o Viruses,2nd ed. (Boston: Elsevier, 2008), and Stephen S. Morse, ed., The Evolutionary Biol-ogy o Viruses (New York: Raven, 1994). Also see Luis Villarreal, Viruses and theEvolution o Lie (Washington, DC: ASM Press, 2005).

19. Villarreal, Are Viruses Alive? 105.20. For Donna Haraways take on her own use o the term trickster, see How

Like a Lea(New York: Routledge, 2000), 6667.

21. The phrase transboundary in nature appears in a consultation docu-ment titled Contributing to One World, One Health: A Strategic Framework orReducing Risks o Inectious Diseases at the Animal-Human-Ecosystems Interace,published or discussion at the International Ministerial Conerence on Avian andPandemic Inuenza in Sharm el-Shiekh, Egypt, in October 2008 by a consortium ointernational agencies (including the World Health Organization, the World Bank,the United Nations Food and Agriculture Association, U.N.I.C.E.F., the World

Organization or Animal Health, and the United Nations System or Inuenza Coor-dination), http://un-inuenza.org/node/2341/ (accessed 27 December 2009). As thedocument states: This Strategic Framework has been developed to address the

potential threat o EID [Emerging Inectious Diseases] at the animal-human-

ecosystems health interace, particularly those that are transboundary in nature andhave the potential or wide-ranging global impacts.

22. Forest Rohwer and Rebecca Vega Thurber, Viruses Manipulate the

Marine Environment, Nature 459 (2009): 208.23. How this came to be the case is the subject o my recent book: A Body

Worth Deending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis o the Modern Body (Dur-ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

24. Oxord English Dictionary, s.v. virus. Etymologically, virus, like thephar-makon on which Derrida meditates in Platos Pharmacy, in Dissemination, trans.Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 1981), 61-172, can reer


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both to poison and to cure. See also Sally Smith Hughes, The Virus: A History o theConcept(New York: Science History Publications, 1977).

25. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization o France, trans. Alan Sheridan and JohnLaw (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). On the multiple germ the-ories during the period, see Nancy Tomes and John Harley Warner, Introductionto the Special Issue on Rethinking the Reception o the Germ Theory o Disease:Comparative Perspectives,Journal o the History o Medicine and Allied Sciences 52

(1997): 716; and Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and MedicalPractice in Britain, 18651900 (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

26. For a succinct history o virology, see V. Essanu, Moments de lhistoiredes ides sur la nature et lorigine des virus, Virologie 39 (1988): 5967. See alsoAlred Grae, A History of Experimental Virology, trans. Elvira Reckendor (NewYork: Springer-Verlag, 1991); and A. P. Waterson and Lise Wilkinson,An Introduc-tion to the History o Virology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

27. Sven Miller and Jacomine Krijnse-Locker, Modifcation o IntracellularMembrane Structures or Virus Replication, Nature Reviews: Microbiology 6 (2008):363.

28. John Farley, Parasites and the Germ Theory o Disease, Millbank Quar-

terly 67, no. S1 (1989): 5068.Farley states: The word parasite was not widelyused; they were helminths or entozoans and their study was termed helminthology,and less oten entozoology or parasitology. Parasitism, thereore, was not seen asa liestyle common to a wide variety o animal groups (Parasites and the GermTheory, 55).

29. Robert Koch, The Etiology o Anthrax, Founded on the Course o Devel-opment o the Bacillus Anthracis [1876], in Essays o Robert Koch, trans. K. CodellCarter (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 118.

30. Robert Koch. Lecture at the First Conerence or the Discussion o theCholera Question [1884], in Essays o Robert Koch, 17178.

31. For an explanation o this bio-logic, see Louis Pasteur, Sur les maladies

virulentes, et en particulaier sur la maladie appele vulgairement cholra des poules,in Oeuvres (Paris: Masson, 192239), 6:291312.32. Pasteur, Oeuvres, 3:481.33. I develop this connection at length in Cohen,A Body Worth Deending.34. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory o Possessive Individualism: Hobbes

to Locke (Oxord: Clarendon, 1962).35. Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Having?: Or, A System o Natural Governance,

Theory, Culture, and Society 25 (2008): 10329.36. Pasteur, Maladies Virulentes, Oeuvres, 6:298.37. Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth

Palmer (Coral Gables, FL: University o Miami Press, 1973), 74.38. Ibid., 77. A bit later in the same section (79) Benveniste links this idiom

to the Roman concepts omunus, immunus, and communis, which lurk at the heart othat other great medical domain, virologys conrere, immunology.

39. Benveniste explicitly ollows Marcel Mauss in his understanding o the git.40. For an extended meditation on this dynamic, see Jacques Derrida, O Hos-

pitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanord, CA: Stanord University Press, 2000).41. Jacques Derrida, Limited, Inc., trans. Jerey Mehlman and Samuel Weber

(Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 90. Emphasis in original.42. Michel Serres, Parasite, trans. Lawrence Schehr (Minneapolis: University

o Minnesota Press, 2007), 8, 10.


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43. Ibid., 10, 24, 79.44. Donna Haraway, The Biopolitics o Postmodern Bodies: Determinations

o Sel in Immune System Discourse, in Haraway, Cyborgs, Simians, and Women:The Reinvention o Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 224. Emphasis added.

45. See, or example, Erik S. Barton et al., Herpes Virus Latency ConersSymbiotic Protection rom Bacterial Inection, Nature 447 (2007): 32630.

46. See, or example, Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century o the Gene (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biol-ogy under the Inuence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health (NewYork: Monthly Review Press, 2007).

47. Reyes R. Novoa et al., Virus Factories: Associations o Cell Organelles orViral Replication and Morphogenesis, Biology o the Cell97 (2005): 14772. Alsosee Claverie, Viruses Take Center Stage, which uses this image to argue both thatviruses are living and that the actory constitutes the unit o lie.

48. Moreira and Lopez-Garcia, Ten Reasons, 310.49. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Dur-

ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).50. Jacques Derrida, Points . . . : Interviews, trans. Elisabeth Weber (Stanord

CA: Stanord University Press, 1995), 472.51. Gilber t Simondon, Lindividu et sa gense physico-biologique (Paris: Jrome

Millon, 1995); Simondon, Lindividuation psychique et collective: la lumire desnotions de orme, inormation, potentiel, et mtastabilit (Paris: Aubier, 1987). For acaptivating extrapolation rom and development o this critique, see Bernard Stiegler,Technics and Time, vol. 1, The Fault o Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth andGeorge Collins (Stanord, CA: Stanord University Press, 1998), as well as the

numerous essays by Stiegler available on the Web site o Ars Industrialis: Associa-tion internationale pour une politique industrielle des technologies de lesprit, www.arsindustrialis.org/les-pages-de-bernard-stiegler (accessed 27 December 2009).

52. Simondon, Lindividuation psychique et collective , 16.

53. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 19712001,trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanord, CA: Stanord University Press, 2002), 193.54. Jon Cohen, Out o Mexico? Scientists Ponder Swine Flus Origins, Sci-

ence 324 (2009): 70070255. Ibid., 700.56. See or example: Vladimir Trionov, Hossein Khiabanian, and Raul Raba-

dan, Geographic Dependence, Surveillance, and Origins o the 2009 Inuenza A(H1N1) Virus, New England Journal o Medicine 361 (2009): 11518; Gavin J. D.Smith et al., Origins and Evolutionary Genomics o the 2009 Swine-Origin H1N1Inuenza A Epidemic, Nature 459 (2009): 112225; Chungen Pan et al., HighGenetic and Antigenetic Similarity between a Swine H3N2 Inuenza A Virus and aPrior Human Inuenza Vaccine Virus: A Possible Immune Pressure-Driven Cross-Species Transmission, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications 285(2009): 4027.

57. Meat International, www.meatinternational.com/news/smithfeld-oods

-ceo-comments-on-mexican-h1n1outbreak-id1434.html (accessed 9 August 2009).The Web site, which subsequently announced that it was closed, has limited itscontent to a set o links to newer articles on meat industries.

58. Michael Pollan, The Omnivores Dilemma: A Natural History o Four Meals(New York: Penguin, 2007).

59. Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking o Genealogy (Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 2007), 207.


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60. Susan Squier, The Sky Is Falling: Risk, Saety, and the Avian Flu, SouthAtlantic Quarterly 107 (2008): 387409.

61. Lewontin and Levins, Biology under the Inuence, 169. In Lorraine Daston,Lie, Chance, and Lie Chances, Daedalus 137:1 (2008): 514, Daston remindsus that statistical thinking only provides ways or managing anxiety about the risksthat lie entails, not or eliminating risk itsel.


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the paradoxical politics of viral containment

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