XXXVI: Adam C. Jones - The Virion Envelopes
Dr Adam C. Jones is a writer and philosopher from East London. A specialist in Hegelianism and Max Stirner, his work focuses on Insurrectionary Communist thought, cybernetics, and the ways in which systems of social control function today. For the past four years he has co-hosted the hit podcast Acid Horizon, with whom he co-wrote Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape. He is also author of The New Flesh: Life and Death in the Data Economy. Join us below in excavating some Okazaki fragments of an interview!
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There seem to me to be many potential viromodels for thinking. Say, something like, I don’t know, Variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, which is, on onset, marked by psychiatric abnormalities, sensory symptoms and ataxia, eventually leading to dementia and death. I’m wondering what you think - is it fair or useful to think of ideology-qua-ideology as clinicopathological?
The Pathologization of ideology is of course the cornerstone of the psychoanalytic critique thereof, reaching all the way back to Wilhelm Reich’s tragic diagnostic of the rise of fascism, all the way to the Zizekian revival of Lacano-Hegelian Marxism in The Sublime Object of Ideology. However in my own work, I maintain a certain biopolitical and crip-theory anxiety towards the use of pathology. For my part, I believe that the new science of bioinformatics, and the inescapability in viral textbooks such as The Principles of Virology of discussing viruses in terms of writing, as a result of this science, has lead to a conceptual rift which allows us to discuss virality in a way which breaks from a simple logic of disease. Previously, the epistemology of viral identification worked by Koch’s Postulates, and was essentially transcendental. By which I mean, one starts with the given symptoms of disease, isolates infected tissue, and then works backwards to identify the virus as such. Now, we can conceptually start on the abstract level with viruses as codes and inscriptive processes and define them from there, allowing, for example, retroviral therapies which rewrite cell genomes without these viruses constituting a medically-recognized disease. Given the politics of immunology and disease, by which people are so often coded as plagues using communicative techniques that are themselves virally distributed through media apparatuses (which I discuss in the book, taking as paradigm cases the ‘social contagion panics’ of contemporary homophobia, transphobia, and the racial panics of the Nazi Regime in its earlier phases), I opted to subtract the clinical model so as to see what one could do in its absence.
However, one cannot indefinitely postpone the normative indefinitely in the name of a pure abstract theory of virality, and I have little qualms with moving from what Polanyi called ‘the fascist virus’ to an open affirmation that there is clearly something sick in a society that embraces fascism, racism etc. This does, however, require a transformation of the concept of sickness and of health, and its political contestation. Fascism, if it is a sickness, cannot be a sickness in the same way that the term is currently bound to disability. The problem with fascism–or indeed with any ideology–is not that it is in some way ‘disabled’. Fascism is itself a disabling force and a eugenic one with its allegiances with the dominant paradigm of sickness which it affirms and derives from the history of liberal and European-American ‘race science’, so the pathological has its limits, and especially the clinical model. I am reminded of one of the examples from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, in which a French colonial torturer came to the clinic, and was completely unresponsive due to the fact that whilst he despised his symptoms, he loved their cause. When it comes to the question of a transformative justice for those infected by the fascist virus, if ideology can be spoken of in such a way, I can only say that I do not know whether a clinical model is sufficient in the way we have historically spoken of it. The ‘rehabilitation’ of those within such an ideological vice has already happened and it did not eliminate, but rather integrated, their fascism. By this, I mean the preservation of Nazi bureaucrats and officers in the post-War institutions of the US and Europe, from West Germany to NASA.
When you look at this image, what do you see, what don’t you see, and what do you want/wish to be seeing?
Loosely speaking, I see a metastable field of connections and patterns of connection which maintain this current form, riven with latent mutability.
Viroids are also quite interesting - hypothetical symbionts that, like viruses, among other things, give rise by mutation to viruses. People like Taylor (2005) say that “viroids have as yet only been found in plants where they induce economically important diseases” (Taylor 2005; emphasis mine). Is language an economically important disease?
I apologize again for somewhat dodging the pathological question, and for potentially doing so in a pathological manner. If these diseases are indeed important for the economy of the plant then it may be better to think of them in terms of symbiosis and mutation, but I’m not sure how well I can speak for the plants! Language, whilst I believe can take upon itself a viral character, is not something I believe to be a disease, no. Yet given that language can be thought of as a universal medium whose terms designate and denote particular things, yet can never fully match them (language is a metastable map placed upon a chaotic territory of sense), that one could see language as either a gift or a curse. It is the gift of communication because as a medium it allows for the exchange of its terms, and yet its universality can also be seen as a curse as that which is designated by language is never fully expressed by it (and yet this is also the possibility of difference, change, and mutation). If language is taken as a curse, then one can argue that its corresponding effect of comprehended reflexivity or self-consciousness is also a curse. I am reminded of those apes given language experimentally who become isolated and depressed, being given the signifiers of a form of life which alienates them from both their captors and their comrades. But we can also think of the coloniality of languages, and of having to speak a hostile tongue for the sake of continued economic existence in a hostile community in which one has already been excommunicated. It is ultimately dependent on the milieu in which the speaker finds themselves.
There seems to be an inherent reterritorialisability in/of virosomes. Virosomes can be used as antigens, for example. Is there a potential way of re-reading the rhizome through/with/against the virosome?
Certainly, the mutability of anything virulent means it is an entity with remarkable potentials of connection, but I am unsure in my fluency with rhizomatics to the extent that this mapping of virosomes onto rhizomatics may already be equivalent on the abstract plane by which rhizomes are defined.
Virostatic is “a substance able to prevent replication”. What anti-ocular virostatic can be found to prevent the viral replication of content in one’s self?
This is a field which has interested me since writing the book. Namely, the recent turn in communications studies which focuses on inoculation against certain messages abundant in the media, which such theorists usually characterise as dis/misinformation. I am speculating here, but a kind of herd immunity would be best to inoculate oneself against semioviruses. By which I mean isolated individuals are most likely to fall prey to peddlers of fascist, racist, conspiratorial etc. content online, and politically vigilant bonds of friendship and community-produced forms of knowledge may be a means to combat this. Virality, for those whom attempt to use it to spread information, is a means of spreading communications which are to be taken as true, as knowledge, and ultimately a virostatic process of inoculation may be nothing more than a counter-hegemonic mode of knowledge-production, with a community which in doing so immunizes itself against such threats.
This next question is in several, maybe chaotic, parts, my apologies. There seem to me to be interesting envelopes and explosions in a variety of different ways of thinking about difference and origin. Say, I don’t know, Peter Carroll, a so-called Sorcerer-Scientist, who states the following in a conversation with Dean Radin, MS, PhD, Chief Scientist at IONS and Associated Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, titled “A Dialog About Magic* and Science by Representatives of Both Traditions”:
I do not participate in parapsychology experiments, and I advise my students not to do so. Magic works capriciously and non-repeatably. We should not squander our abilities on things that do not really matter to us.
I refer you to the equations of magic, where all factors lie on a scale of 0 to 1:
Pm = P + (1-P)M1/p and M = GLSB.
The first equation quantifies the difference to the probability of an event that an act of magic M can make, and it’s not much unless the magic value lies close to unity. The second equation qualifies what you need to put into an act of magic – Gnosis, Magical Link, Subliminalisation, and Belief, and these remain impossible to objectively quantify and problematical in laboratory conditions.
I prefer the mass of humanity not to believe in magic, that way we do not get persecuted for it or end up working behind barbed wire. I make fun of magic to most of my friends and acquaintances, so they don’t fear me or make impossible requests, even so, quite a few seem jealous of my improbable successes in life.
Trying to objectively prove that sigils or any other kind of spell actually works seems as problematical as trying to simply prove that ‘some wishes sometimes come true’.” (IONS 2023)
Then someone like John C. Cramer (1986), who in “The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics” reviews the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics and something that appeals to Carroll, the idea of “quantum handshakes”, which describe a relationship between an emitter and absorber, both forward and backward in time, and the process becomes complete and irreversible when a whole quanta has become exchanged. Implicit here seems to be not merely ideas of (ex)change/exchange as mutatio, as commutatio, but of foregrounding and backgrounding. Which makes me think of Katherine Reuben’s definitions of systems and subsystems in DID:
A system is a collection of alters within one body. The entirety of a dissociative identity disorder (DID) system includes all of the alters within one body. Research suggests that males average 12 alters and females average 15 alters. However, systems can range in size from 2 alters to 100s of alters, although in very large systems it is unlikely that all alters will front frequently. Instead, alters in large systems are likely to become active mostly when needed or triggered, and they often present in pairs or small groups.
Subsystems are systems within systems. There are two main types of subsystems. The first refers to separate internal groups within one larger system. In this case, two or more groups of alters might have developed separately, and they may or may not be aware of the other group(s). While groups may have good communication and co-consciousnes among themselves, they may lose time when alters from other subsystems front, making communication through notes or sympathetic outsiders necessary. Different subsystems may reside in different locations in an internal world or may have non-overlapping internal worlds. They may exist to deal with different types of trauma and may not be aware of what other subsystems have experienced. Some subsystems might be entirely trauma locked; for example, someone with DID might have a group of alters who experience themselves as permanently trapped in an abusive environment, can only rarely communicate with the main group of alters, and cannot understand that the body is no longer trapped and hurting.
The second type of subsystem deals with alters who have their own alters (yes, it is like “alterception!”). These alters may or may not use the same internal presentation. That is to say, if Alter A has their own alters A1, A2, and A3, the other alters might experience all of the A alters as being different individuals who are only recognizable as Alter A because they all claim the same or a similar name and are never around at the same time. On the other hand, it is also possible that the other alters might experience all of the A alters as having to share one internal “body” and voice as outsiders experience the overall system as doing. Alters from this type of subsystem may or may not be aware of each other and may or may not have good communication. They may be very similar and differ mainly in regards to their age, function, or traits such as gender, or they may be complete alters in their own right.
Systems can also be affectionately referred to as collectives, internal families, clans, or crews. (Rueben 2024)
I quote all this to ask: can language be thought of in similar ways - as chaos magic, as systemic ‘alterception’, or, putting it as Caroll does, if there is something viral about language, and language is a virus of consciousness, then “does any information processing device that can monitor both some parts of its environment and some of its own internal states, have consciousness to some degree” - including the virus itself? And if that virulence is inextricable from any and all acts of parlance - written, drawn, projected, imag(in)ed, or spoken - which consciousness is fronted in the act and/or does it matter?
Peter Watts would be a far better critic of a dominant pathological model of DID with his character of The Squad in Blindsight than myself honestly! The chaos magicians–even going back to Austin Osman Spare, whom I read following the book to see whether I could connect philosophically the sigil to the slogan or logo–are not ultimately that philosophically inclined regarding language. This is in-part due to their total dedication to results-based pragmatism. However, to my knowledge, Peter Carroll does not take on board the dialectical response to the problem of the criterion by which the results are measured. This is not unique to Chaos Magick, for neither does Crowley with his ‘Scientific Illuminism’ which simply chases a positivist scientific empiricism, which is ultimately pre-critical. If we were to define consciousness solely as informational processing, and this seems to be not only the panpsychist position, but also, when read computationally, the position of the Churchlands, then I ultimately agree with Ray Brassier that this is a kind of untenable computational idealism. These idealisms and ontologies are that which I believe virality destabilises with its mutational character, which resists being pinned down (and this is why I essentially gave up on any ontological attempt here). If there is any theoretical analogue, Bataille’s notion of Base Matter, which is that which grounds all ideal-base distinctions, and yet is not reducible to any baseness as it is defined within said distinction (and indeed, exceeds it entirely), may be the closest. I do not say this to shut down the question, but only that I cannot say with any certainty that I could accept the presuppositions of Carroll etc.
If language or semiotics is some sort of catalyzing vector, do we have to infect ourselves in order to escape ourselves - as it is for Gerry Lane in World War Z; a viral counter-viral tactic of camouflage in an overarching strategy of virulence, to use de Certeauean language? In other words, can we think virally and/or virulence toward something radically emancipatory?
Regarding the first part of this question, the question of camouflage is indeed very useful, but I do not think that a coding which camouflages is necessarily the same as an emancipatory virulence. It can be politically necessary to move under and between codes, so to speak, for survival however. Code-switching and what Charles Mills called ‘Conscious Episodic Passing’ being the best examples, to escape the perception of others whom would persecute you if they perceived a different code of you. In Anti-Oculus I used the example of the head of the NAACP Walter White, who whilst officially classified as Black under the US’ ‘Blood Quantum’ rule, was white skinned, and who used his position to report on lynchings in the American south undetected and rally resistance against them. Virulence itself however cannot be emancipatory, but a tool of getting the message out there, of spreading the word regarding the possibility of liberation, of communicating forms of struggle, and of rewriting the codes which play a part in determining our perception of ourselves and others.
Transcription, regulatory, network, reporter, multiplexity, inputs, nodes, processing, operator, repressor, promoter, enhancer, machinery, expression, localization, profiling, messenger, translation, sequence, mediator, housekeeper, facultative, inducible, constitutive, translocation, transport, export, folding - why do you think so much of the terminology of gene expression expresses ideas inextricable from the law, labour, and the letter, or the law of labour in the letter?
Many a geneticist will say these are metaphors, but on the level of a functional relation, what they mean and what they do can often coincide, and this is especially the case when it comes to inscription/writing. With terms such as ‘housekeeper’ etc. This is predominantly down to the historical determinants of the language of labour, which reduces people to their position within the relations of production. To this extent, science risks taking these labour-relations as biological laws when they are not sufficiently careful or historical with their concepts, and they end up in what Hegel called the ‘inverted world’ where the law of the appearance of these activities is more real than the activities themselves, and they sink even deeper into the abstraction that defines the biological ‘essences’ of the activity. This is an essentialism which I believe we should historicise, criticise, and ultimately resist.
If seasonal outbreaks are tied to the sequence and duration of seasons, does the annulment or hyperextension of certain seasons as a result of climate change portend both the possibility/inevitability of permanent and impossible outbreaks? How does this potentially tie into the lifecycle of information in the ‘digicology’ of the digital Commons?
We are sadly a long way from the digital commons, and we are stuck at the mercy of what Tiziana Terranova calls the ‘Corporate Platform Complex’, running itself on the abstract continuum of digital clock time, as opposed to the calendric time of the seasons. But whilst our new flesh may be hooked on the former, as is all labouring time regulated by it, the meat is also drawn along the seasons of the calendar. The twitter phenomenon of ‘meltdown may’, depressive upticks in post-content around winter, and at times of the day when one has more screentime for posting all contribute to these fluctuations for sure.
