Enterprising biotechnologists have used phages to create all manner of chimera-creatures with genetic components from multiple species. Viruses that infect bacteria and other microorganisms are called “phages.” Phages have been widely used in molecular biology labs to introduce new synthetic genes into bacteria. In her essay “Contingent Contagion,” Sria Chatterjee reminds us that seeing with scientific apparatuses is a political act that can get in the way of other approaches to reckoning with unseen entities at the edge of the known world.Īgainst the backdrop of the vast unknown virosphere, a small number of viruses have been studied for their world-forming capacity. Interpreting raw data from such a constellation of devices, virologists conjure ontological entities from invisible worlds. 4 Though viruses are commonly visualized with a constellation of scientific apparatuses and analytic techniques, an imaginative leap is always required to “see” traces of any particular virus, as Celia Lowe points out in her essay in this issue, “The Viral Real.” Virologists construct our fragile and provisional knowledge of the virosphere by making informed guesses aided by scanning electron microscopes, X-ray crystallographs, protein models, gene-sequencing machines, bioinformatics algorithms, PCR tests, and rapid antigen detection kits. Our knowledge of the virosphere is very limited, made from a fragile architecture of “factishes”-provisional facts about viruses that often suffer from the misplaced concreteness of fetish objects. New phage therapies are being used to transform the bacterial communities in the human gut. This special issue of e-flux journal seeks to reckon with the multitude of invisible viral agents waiting to disrupt, detour, and reroute established modes of life.īacterophages (phages) are viruses that infect bacteria. 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.” 2 According to Patricia Clough and Jasbir Puar, 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.” 3 In recent years, however, viral theory in the humanities and social sciences hasn’t kept pace with the scientific initiatives starting to peek into the virosphere’s vast unknown realms. Simply put, viruses are winners in the game of life. Viruses are the most abundant life-form in the world and more than 99.9 percent of viral species remain unstudied. Genetic diversity on planet earth is a story of viral diversity. Viruses have been found in seemingly inhospitable locations like deep-sea vents, glacial ice, as well as extremely hot and acidic springs. They are nomadic-constantly floating among cells, bodies, and populations, jumping species and moving between domains of life. These infectious agents are world-forming as well as world-destroying. Other viruses that enter your body belong to the insects, fungi, animals, and bacteria living within us, or near us. Of the billion or so viral particles you encounter each day, you bump into some that are capable of infecting human cells. Viruses enter your body each time you take a bite of food or a drink of water. With every breath, you inhale around six liters of air with thousands (or even millions) of viral particles. You have always lived within the virosphere-the vast but poorly understood universe of viruses. Confined to your own apartment or small social bubble, you might have thought you were beyond the sphere of viral influence. Perhaps you thought you could isolate yourself from viruses during the lockdowns of the coronavirus pandemic.
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