October 21, 2022, 5:30pm
School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
64 Banbury Road, lecture room
Oxford OX2 6PN
UK
Viruses have lurked on the margins of cultural theory ever since Deleuze and Guattari suggested that “our viruses make us form a rhizome with other creatures.” Haraway wrote about the potential of viruses to induce symbiogenesis in her classic essay on “The Promises of Monsters”—referring to the way that AIDS activists were able to create a symbiotic relationship with HIV through alliances with journalists, politicians, pharmaceutical companies, and scientists. In the age of the internet virality became “a form of communication and transmission across various domains: the biological, the cultural, the financial, the political, the linguistic, the technical, and computational,” in the words of Patricia Clough and Jasbir Puar. This special issue of e-flux journal nudges viral theory from the margins towards the center of contemporary discourse. Essays in the collection offer an array of tactics and strategies for living among a multitude of invisible viral agents that lay in wait—ready to disrupt, detour, and reroute established modes of life.
Speakers: Sria Chatterjee (Paul Mellon Centre), Stephan Guttinger (University of Exeter), and Eben Kirksey (University of Oxford)
Read the texts by Chatterjee, Guttinger, and Kirksey, and the full special issue here.
Stay tuned for future events with other viral theorists in the collection: Hannah Landecker (UCLA), Mel Chen (Berkeley), Caitlin Berrigan (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna), Rachel Vaughn (UCLA), & Tim Dean (Illinois)
Time: Friday, October 21, 2022, 5:30pm Oxford (for a 5:45 start) / Berlin, Germany 6:45pm start / New York, United States, 12:45pm start. Zoom link.
