The Social Construction of Corona: I- Conceptions of the Viral

This essay is, hopefully, the beginning of a series on the social construction of the new Corona, or the Covid 19, pandemic. Evidently, by “social construction” I do not presume to deny the underlying material reality. In a way, part of my exposition will be about how this material reality is experienced socially. I am not, however, using the term “social experience,” first because I do not want to inadvertently create an association with “social experimenting,” and second, because I am also going to ponder on how the social influences, shapes, and/or reinvents the material. 

Maybe these essays/blog posts will offer nothing new: some of the world’s most renowned critical theorists have already jumped in to comment; perhaps they, as usual, already said all that is to be said; maybe some will find in what I say something innovative or even controversial, others redundant and derivative; maybe they comprise nothing but a set of exercises to avoid intellectual atrophy in the quarantine – like athletes who would need to move around the room, do planks, squats, and whatever athletic people do, until the gyms reopen; and maybe it is my attempt to grapple with or even domesticate the fear (the first draft of this essay was in fact written under severe self-isolation because of a mild yet persistent cough that may have been purely psychological).

Of course the experience of getting sick, of quarantining and/or isolation, the fear of contagion, and the spread of disease may seem to transcend the social: they are all transhistorical phenomena not limited to our epoch or society; this, however, does not preclude their historicization or make them any less social. Let me illustrate by introducing two points that may at first seem self-evident, and that I may take up further in later posts. First, to focus our lens on the social-discursive and relegate the material to the blurred outlining matrix: our fear of the disease is firmly based in an understanding of infection as spreading by contagion. This hasn’t always been the case. Our understanding of contagion is largely indebted to Ibn Sina (Avicenna, if we want to try to obscure his Arab-Persian name and Islamic context) who revised Gallenus’ theory of “bad air” proposing an early theory of germs and contamination. This is not to argue for the complete novelty of the concept of infection and contagion, either; clearly Gallen’s bad air does not foreclose the possibility of infectious organisms. Before Ibn Sina’s intervention, however, the dominant Gallenic episteme understood disease to be primarily the composite effect of the rotting of still air and the alteration of the body fluids, or the humours – this persisted in the European Renaissance even as people started coming to terms with Ibn Sina’s discovery: in Renaissance literature we find recurrent references to melancholy (black bile) and choler (yellow bile) as fluids that run through the body causing depression and anger respectively (terms which are preserved in our modern culture and medicine even as their meanings shifted). The vile air, the excess humidity (rheumy) that disturbs the humors (causing rheumatism, initially understood as an excess of body humidity), and the possibility of a contagious effect of these elements– in a manner that both faithfully reconstructs the Gallenic episteme but could also be re-interpreted in light of more modern theories of contagion—all present themselves forcefully in Portia’s reproach to Brutus in Julius Caesar (Act 2 Scene 1):

“Is Brutus sick? And is it physical
to walk unbracèd and suck up the humors
Of the dank morning? What, is Brutus sick,
And will he steal out of his wholesome bed,
To dare the vile contagion of the night
And tempt the rheumy and unpurgèd air
to add unto his sickness?”  

  

Some of Ibn Sina’s revisions, some lingering Gallenic effects, were thus adopted in medieval and Renaissance Europe as a theory of vapors (yes, like Hamlet’s “vile and pestilent congregation of vapours”—by the way, if you haven’t noticed, I am mixing American and British spellings as I want, I am subject of both empires!) and little by little we discovered that these vapors consist of unseen microorganisms. It is under this epistemic regime and as a result of this scientific-social history that we fear and are aware of the possibility of getting the sickness from someone who is already sick; this largely shapes our social experience of disease, infection, and the pandemic. A whole set of social practices that perhaps assuage the fear (now I am isolated, I cannot get other people sick/ get myself infected) or exacerbate it (Oh my god, I won’t only be sick, I will be sick and alone!) ensued.

Second, to shift our focus to the material: the material production of the pandemic is embedded in a set of material-social networks and practices: the vast network of transnational and transcontinental transportation that allows us to travel and carry the disease with us, along with our socialization into travel as not only a simple fact of life (not so simple, of course, for those of us who cannot afford it) but also as a working necessity, a coveted pastime, a glamorous leisurely activity, a means of education, etc. (again this is not to be misinterpreted as railing against the merit of travel: exposing our socialization into reality is not always means to criticize or dismiss it).

The mortifying spread of the virus, and the viral spread of fear, both sent shockwaves around the world even before Covid 19 became a pandemic. We anticipated its arrival in our countries in fear even before (we knew) it arrived. The spread of the virus was mirrored, anticipated, and exceeded by the spread of news, fabrications, rumors, hyperboles, conspiracy theories, jokes, memes, tragic posts, etc., in the media and especially on the internet. It is no coincidence that we use the term viral to describe such out of control spread of data— a testament to the social life of scientific discoveries even in popular cultures. The convergence of the spread of the virus and the spread of data, a convergence registered through the term viral, reminds us of the material/literal fact on which our metaphor of the viral is based. Both acted together to produce a viral pandemic.

It is apt, therefore, to begin our exploration of the figures of Covid 19 by analyzing an image that went viral during the early days of the spread of the disease, which will be the subject of my next post.