Speculative Virontology: Malevolent Infrastructure against the Design of Infrastructural Intimacy in Pulse
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i28.525Keywords:
virontology, design, infrastructure, intimacy, malevolency, horrorAbstract
In this article, speculative virontology refers to a form of thought that revalues the biontological framework present in current queer theoretical and new materialist thinking. Using an archive of horror films, Paul Golding’s Pulse from 1988 in particular, this article points toward malevolent infrastructure – the conceptualization of matter that is performatively terrorizing the closedness of mutually constitutive design of infrastructural intimacy and the immanence of biontology. Both intimacy and immanence depend on production of space and time which exclude forms of life that are not white middle-class cisnormative (re)productive heterosexuality and thus deemed not properly alive and outside of Being. The figure of the Virus upsets these processes of exclusion and divisions, and reorders conceptuality away from immanence and biontology toward what is non-biontological, toward that which is neither Life nor Nonlife.
References
Abram, Simone, Winthereik, Brit Ross, and Thomas Yarrow. “Current thinking – an introduction.” In Electrifying Anthropology: Exploring Electrical Practices and Infrastructures, edited by Simone Abram, Brit Ross Winthereik, and Thomas Yarros, 1–22. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350102675.0006
Alloa, Emmanuel and Élie During, eds. Choses en soi: Métaphysique du réalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3917/puf.alloa.2018.01.0149
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822391623
Colebrook, Claire. Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press and Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2014. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/ohp.12329362.0001.001
Johnson, Bob. Mineral Rites: An Archeology of the Fossil Economy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/book.66176
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2008. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350252059
Murphy, Michelle. “Chemical Infrastructures of the St. Clair River.” In Toxicants, Health and Regulation since 1945, edited by Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas, 103–15. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315654645-6
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373810
Wilson, Ara. “The Infrastructure of Intimacy.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, 2 (2016): 247–80. doi: 10.1086/682919 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/682919
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 AM Journal of Art and Media Studies
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
AM Journal of Art and Media Studies ISSN 2217-9666 - printed, ISSN 2406-1654 - online, UDK 7.01:316.774
Contact: amjournal@outlook.com
Publisher: Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia
Indexed in: ERIH PLUS, EBSCO, DOAJ, and in The List of Scientific Journals Categorization of Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia (M24-2021). Beginning with No. 12 2017, AM is indexed, abstracted and covered in Clarivate Analytics service ESCI.
