Viral

Viral

Volume 40, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2012
Amy Herzog, Joe Rollins
Excerpted from the Editor’s Note

Prescient nearly thirty years ago, Haraway’s observation retains its foreboding accuracy. And yet, as the genetic material of that single thought encounters and infects the quotes to follow, other cellular structures appear; the epigraph is recombinant. Transmission; vaccination; replication; infection; reproduction; immunity; vulnerability; permeability; meme, median, mode; words; ideas; code: these are just some of the ironies, pleasures, and paradoxes of our inquiry here in the Viral issue of WSQ.

The discovery of vaccines that could prompt the body to resist viral infection happened almost a century before viruses were discovered; their effect—immune responses that could prevent disease—long preceded discovery of a cause. Viruses themselves were first identified by a botanist studying disease in tobacco crops, an attempt to stop unseen forces wreaking havoc in the agricultural economy. Biological viruses are parasitic, infectious agents dependent on the bodies of the hosts in which they replicate. They maintain a highly paradoxical relationship to the entities and systems that provide for their very existence, yet which they mimic, incorporate, mutate, and potentially destroy. Viruses share a tremendous capacity for adaptation, and for disruption—unruly, noisy forces that can divert systemic flows. Rather than viewing viruses as alien others, infiltrating systems from the outside, we might consider the virus’s ability to bring to light aspects of discord inherent in the networks in which they thrive. In this sense, echoing work on the role of viruses as formative agents in evolutionary biology, the virus functions as an element of difference that is constitutive of the larger system. “The difference is part of the thing itself,” Michel Serres writes of the parasite-system complex, “and perhaps even produces the thing. . . . In the beginning was the noise.”