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+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html>
+ <head>
+ <meta charset="UTF-8">
+ <title> Ici THK — Cyberfeminism </title>
+ <link rel="stylesheet" href="assets/css/style.css">
+ </head>
+ <body>
+ <header>
+ <h1> <a href="index.html">Ici THK</a> </h1>
+ <h2> Deborah Lupton </h2>
+ <h3> Sociology </h3>
+ </header>
+ <main>
+ <article>
+ <section id="author">
+ <h4>About the Author</h4>
+ <p>Deborah Lupton worked already in 1993 on the analogy
+ between the communication of technology threats and of
+ diseases, she presents us the analogy that is voluntary
+ made between the computer and the body in a hygienic
+ society where we tend to rely on centralized organisation
+ to desinfect and sanitize our world. Since then the issue
+ of scale and control.</p>
+ </section>
+ <section id="sources">
+ <h4>Sources</h4>
+ <p><a href="assets/BookChapt_TacticalBiopolitics_subRosa.pdf">
+ <em>Panic computing: The viral metaphor and computer technology</em></a>,
+ Cultural Studies, 8:3, pp.556—568 ISSN 0950-2386</p> (Subrosa; 1999)
+ </section>
+ <section id="scare">
+ <h4> Panic computing: The viral metaphor and computer technology </h4>
+
+ <p>The unproblematic use of the term 'virus' applied to
+ technological artefacts, inspire ponderings on the wider
+ implications of the viral metaphor. The choice of
+ phraseology in textual accounts and talk, the discursive
+ devices used, recurrent lexical patterns in describing
+ things, events, groups or people is revealing of the
+ latent ideological layer of meaning of such
+ communications (van Dijk, 1990; Fowler, 1991). In
+ particular, the intertextuality, or the ways in which
+ texts selectively draw upon other texts, other cultural
+ forms and discourses to create meaning, indicates the
+ political and ideological functions of texts and delimits
+ the boundaries within which topics may be discussed
+ (Fairclough, 1992; Astroff and Nyberg, 1992). *The
+ nomination of a type of computer technology malfunction
+ as a 'virus'* is a highly significant and symbolic
+ linguistic choice of metaphor, used to make certain
+ connections between otherwise unassociated subjects and
+ objects, to give meaning to unfamiliar events, to render
+ abstract feelings and intangible processes concrete. In
+ doing so, the metaphor shapes perception, identity and
+ experience, going beyond the original association by
+ evoking a host of multiple meanings (Clatts and Mutchler,
+ 1989: 106-7). As Geertz has argued, '[i]n metaphor one
+ has.., a stratification of meaning, in which an
+ incongruity of sense on one level produces an influx of
+ significance on another' (1973: 210).</p>
+ </section>
+ <section id="viruses-and-the-computer-corpus">
+ <h4>Viruses and the Computer Corpus</h4>
+
+ <p>The present analysis examines in detail the
+ stratification of meaning evident in the widespread and
+ largely unquestioned adoption of the viral metaphor to
+ describe computer technology malfunction in popular
+ texts. It is argued that the viral metaphor used in the
+ context of computer technology draws upon a constellation
+ of discourses concerning body boundaries, erotic
+ pleasure, morality, invasion, disease and destruction. In
+ what follows, the meanings of the term 'virus' in the
+ medical context, the symbiotic relationship between body
+ and computer metaphorical systems, the symbolic danger of
+ viruses, the seductiveness of the human/computer,
+ Self/Other relationship and the cultural crisis around
+ issues of bodies, technologies and sexualities at the fin
+ de millénnium are discussed to illuminate the ambivalent
+ relationship of humans with computer technology in late
+ capitalist societies.</p>
+ </section>
+ <section id="morality-and-viral-politics">
+ <h4>Morality and viral politics</h4>
+
+ <p>There are no "good" Germs or 'normal Germs; all Germs are
+ bad' (Helman, 1978: 118-19). To counter this attack, as
+ Cindy Patton points out, bodies are visualized as being
+ 'filled with tiny defending armies whose mission [is] to
+ return the "self" to the precarious balance of health'
+ (Patton, 1990: 60). The immune system is commonly
+ described in popular and medical texts as mounting a
+ 'defence' or 'siege' against 'murderous' viruses or
+ bacteria which are 'fought', 'attacked' or 'killed' by
+ white blood cells, drugs or surgical procedures (Martin,
+ 1990; Montgomery, 1991). This military discourse,
+ redolent with images of physical aggression, has become
+ routine and standardized to the point where its
+ metaphorical origins are erased: it is now a 'dead'
+ metaphor (Montgomery, 1991: 350).</p>
+ </section>
+ <section id="the-seduction-and-terror-of-cyberspace">
+ <h4>The seduction and terror of cyberspace</h4>
+ <p>The viral metaphor has been adopted in computing
+ terminology to express the meanings of rapid spread and
+ invisible invasion of an entity that is able to reproduce
+ itself and causes malfunctioning on the systemic
+ level. It is telling that this alternative use has been
+ so readily accepted that at least one Australian medical
+ journal has featured articles on computer viruses devoted
+ to making explicit the similarities between biological
+ viruses and computer viruses (Dawes, 1992a, 1992b). Just
+ as the immune system is described in terms of military
+ imagery, popular accounts of computer viruses commonly
+ employ the terminology of war to conceptualize the
+ struggle between technological order and chaos. [....]
+ Ways of describing computer technology have both created
+ new terminology which has entered the language and have
+ drawn upon elements of older, more established lexical
+ systems. In particular, drawing upon the centuries-old
+ body/machine discourse, there has developed a symbiotic
+ metaphorical relationship between computers and humans,
+ in which computers have been anthropomorphized while
+ humans have been portrayed as 'organic computers'
+ (Berman, 1989: 7).The immune system is also commonly
+ described as an information-processing system,
+ communicating by means of hormones. By this imagery,
+ there occurs 'the transformation of the human subject
+ into an object, a repository, or else a collision site,
+ for various types of detectable and useable information'
+ (Montgomery, 1991: 383). Indeed, according to Haraway,
+ bodies have conceptually become cyborgs
+ (cyberneticorganisms), that is, 'techno-organic, humanoid
+ hybrids' (Haraway, 1990:21), or compounds of machine and
+ body theorized in terms of communications, for which
+ disease may be conceptualized as 'a subspecies of
+ information malfunction or communications pathology'
+ (Haraway, 1989: 15).</p>
+ </section>
+ <section id="the-viral-metaphor-and-technophobia">
+ <h4>The viral metaphor and technophobia</h4>
+ <p>At the fin de millénnium, the body is a site of toxicity,
+ contamination and catastrophe, subject to and needful of
+ a high degree of surveillance and control. Kroker and
+ Kroker (1988:10 ff.) term the contemporary obsession
+ with clean bodily fluids as 'Body McCarthyism', an
+ hysterical new temperance movement. [...] 'Panic
+ Computing' invokes '[t]he underlying moral imperative
+ ... You can't trust your best friend's software any more
+ than you can trust his or her bodily fluids - safe
+ software or no software at all!' (Ross, 1991: 108). The
+ insertion of an 'infected' disk, that is a 'carrier' of
+ corruption, spells disaster for the integrity of the
+ computer corpus. Just as people are exhorted to grill
+ their sexual partners for details of their past intimate
+ lives, so as to be 'sure and safe' before proceeding to
+ exchange bodily fluids, so they are warned to verify the
+ source and safety of the computer disks they insert into
+ their PCs (Sontag, 1989: 167).</p>
+ </section>
+ </article>
+ <nav>
+ <ul>
+ <li><a href="bernard-aspe.html">ASPE</a></li>
+ <li><a href="karen-barad.html">BARAD</a></li>
+ <li><a href="muriel-combes.html">COMBES</a></li>
+ <li><a href="stephane-lupasco.html">LUPASCO</a></li>
+ <li><a href="deborah-lupton.html">LUPTON</a></li>
+ <li><a href="lynn-margulis.html">MARGULIS</a></li>
+ <li><a href="gilbert-simondon.html">SIMONDON</a></li>
+ <li><a href="subrosa.html">SUBROSA</a></li>
+ <li><a href="etc.html">Etc.</a></li>
+ </ul>
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