Hi Gilles! How are you doing these days?
I’m OK. I stay at home, as almost always.
What are you doing there with your old mobile?
Trying to download a contact tracing app.
Elderly persons with weak lungs belong to
the high-risk group, so I thought I’d better
get this thing…
It won’t work. Your mobile is too old and
you are a puppet.
OK, then. I also suspect these apps to constitute
just another feature of the societies of control.
Remember? Felix and me talking about electronic
tagging and imagining a world in which access
to specific places was granted or refused
by a central computer?
Yeah, I often thought about it during the
last days and weeks. I also looked up again
what you wrote about viruses.
Only a few lines, mostly in "A Thousand Plateaus."
For example: “We form a rhizome with our
viruses, or rather our viruses cause us to
form a rhizome with other animals“ (TP 10).
The famous rhizome! Unfortunately, this was
quoted so often that one has a hard time understanding
what it actually means.
Well, it belonged to the things that Félix
and I took from our discussion of the modern
life sciences, in particular molecular biology.
In the 1970s, the great biologist François
Jacob talked about “genetic fragments”
that might be transferred by viruses; about
transversal connections between species subverting
the model of the tree and of filiation; and
about the “abominable couplings” between
microorganisms, animals, and humans...
You also write: “We oppose epidemic to filiation,
contagion to heredity, populating by contagion
to sexual reproduction […].” (TP 241).
And we continue: “Bands, human or animal,
proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields,
and catastrophes.“ (ibid.). You see? All
of this is not very peaceful. Because epidemics
combine and confront rather different things,
“for example, a human being, an animal,
and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism“
(TP 242). The rhizome is a biological and
sociological phenomenon, it is also a technological
reality. Today, contact tracing apps are part
and parcel of the Corona rhizome, which also
means it includes mobiles, radio towers, computers,
algorithms, and so on.
Still I am missing something…
You mean physicians and politicians? They
are also part of it. Rhizomes can be rather
extended and complex…
Well, that’s precisely not my point. And
I am also not referring to the dark side of
these assemblages. You do account for it,
for example when you highlight the fact that,
in an epidemic, nature operates against itself.
You even say: „We evolve and die more from
our polymorphous and rhizomatic flus than
from hereditary diseases […]“ (TP 11).
So, what do you miss?
A reflection about the conditions under which
rhizomes can emerge at all, or an idea about
how the encounters they are based upon became
possible. In the case of the Coronavirus,
there has to be at least the virus itself,
animals and human beings; but then there has
to be a market where they get in touch, and
a city where this rhizome can be extended,
including streets, bikes, cars, planes, and
so on.
Sure, eventually you need something like the
Integrated (or rather Integrating) World Capitalism,
in order to have all of this actually functioning
together.
And then I wonder if we could do something
against this.
It’s not easy. One of the first steps might
be what I mentioned in the beginning:
stay at home. By this simple measure, we protect
ourselves against contagion but also against
universal communication and the control technologies
of the present age. I always was convinced
that the crucial movements were intensive
voyages, “voyages in place” (TP 482).
Did you know? Eventually, the nomad is one
who does not depart, does not want to depart,
who clings to the smooth space...
Well, I somehow do like to move and to travel.
But ok for now, I am going home and will think
about what you said.
And I am going to get me a new mobile...
