9 - Viral Capitalism
from Contagion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
Summary
Capitalism is not a human invention, but a viral contagion, replicated cyberpositively across post-human space […] if schizophrenia is not yet virally programmed it will be in the future.
(Plant and Land 1994: paras 14, 19)The factory is hijacked by these self-interested blueprints. In a sense it was crying out to be hijacked. If you fill your factory with machines so sophisticated that they can make anything that any blueprint tells them to make it is hardly surprising if sooner or later a blueprint arises that tells these machines to make copies of itself. The factory fills up with more and more of these rogue machines, each churning out rogue blueprints for making more machines that will make more of themselves. Finally, the unfortunate bacterium bursts and releases millions of viruses that infect new bacteria. So much for the normal life cycle of the virus in nature.
(Dawkins 2006: 131)It would not be too farfetched to say that the extermination of mankind begins with the extermination of germs. Man, with his humours, his passions, his laughter, his genitalia, his secretions, is really nothing more than a filthy little germ disturbing the universe of transparency. Once everything will have been cleansed, once an end will have been put to all viral processes and to all social and bacillary contamination, then only the virus of sadness will remain.
(Baudrillard 2012: 37)I have elaborated a series of contagious forms: nonhuman animals, organs without bodies, artiforgs and clones. Each had modes of transmission, degrees of virulence, modes of survival and moments of capture. They circulated in packs, in masses, as classes and castes, as metastases, with and without organs, within and without bodies. I gave them foundations technoscientific, biocapitalistic, biopolitical, psychoanalytical, schizoanalytical and simulacral. I then pursued them through factories, laboratories, schools, slums, hospitals, showrooms, islands, cities and across the globe. They desired, produced, laboured and consumed, heroically or miserably, sometimes with a breakthrough, other times falling into black holes. With Frankenstein, I began at the beginning of SF, so I want to end with something new. To bring this part to a close, I want to introduce one last contagious form. Viruses.
Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral (2012) engages biotechnology, bodily transformation and psychosis, all the time maintaining a selfreflexive approach towards the cinematic image.
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- Deleuze and BaudrillardFrom Cyberpunk to Biopunk, pp. 216 - 240Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016