The Virality of Pandemics: Reassembling the Social in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which was the first pandemic of the twenty-first century, viral epidemics, such as the avian flu, swine flu, Ebola, COVID-19, et cetera, have been appearing with increasing frequency. The adaptation of existing diseases and the emergence of novel viruses are a cause of concern and need to be situated in the context of the anthropogenic events such as deforestation, collapsing biodiversity, species extinction and the melting of polar ice caps. Can the virus make us rethink the categories of life–non-life and classificatory practices of biology? How does the trope of immunity link viral diseases and modern forms of biopower? I attempt to locate the virus as an actor in the evolution of life on the planet that sutures the domains of biological, social, political and the geological. The virus forces us to re-examine our conception of sociality, which is predicated on instituting dichotomies of human–non-human and nature–culture. The reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic may help in overcoming the inertia and helplessness in facing planetary climate crisis.

Introduction

This article attempts to situate the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) COVID-19 pandemic within the larger context of climate change or the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a new geological epoch of planetary history that claims that human activity has left an indelible mark on the atmosphere and geological strata of the planet. The consequences of this geological agency are manifested in rising sea levels and planetary temperature, massive loss of biodiversity, species extinction, increasing droughts, forest fires, floods, et cetera. The search for the moment of origin of the Anthropocene has been narrowed down to four key events, or ‘golden spikes’. ¹ Even though the scientific evidence of planetary crisis is alarming, the political responses to the Anthropocene have ranged from outright denial to expressions of helplessness at the sheer magnitude of the problem.

Chakrabarty (2014) says that the Anthropocene conflates three kinds of histories that trouble our scales of temporality, spanning a period of billions of years to the contemporary moment: first, the lifeless planetary history of the earth, a pre-biotic soup of chemical reactions of water, sunlight and gases that in a chance combination spurred the emergence of basic protein molecules; second, the history of evolutionary life that begins with the emergence of the first cell and includes all organisms of the past, including the present; and third, the history of the industrial era, (eighteenth to twentieth century) pertaining to the human arrangements of organising human (bios), animal (zoe) and geological matter (geos) through an interconnected matrix of colonialism, capitalism and industrialism. Chakrabarty proclaims that the third history of industrial life and the burning of fossil fuels have exacerbated the climate crisis. I examine the role of the virus in participating in all three stages of history.

In the first section, I examine the agency of the virus in narrating the bio-story of the planet that articulates the geo-story of the climate change discourse. It is concerned primarily with the origins of life, the emergence of fundamental macromolecules and the subsequent cell as the basic unit of life. The virus poses a taxonomic problem by straddling the liminal zone of life and non-life. It helps us question human exceptionalism and its distinctive claim to dominate all other species of the planet, which informs the second section. By blurring the distinction between life and non-life, the virus connects the world of humans and animals, especially in the context of pathogenic zoonotic diseases that jump the species barrier. The third section deals with the enfolding of the political around the biological through the arrangements of bio-power which are operated through maintaining the distinction between zoe and bios. More precisely, it explores how politico-jural concepts of immunity structure contemporary biological and medical discourse. In the fourth section, I turn to Gabriel Tarde’s concept of monad to explore a formulation of the social through the concept of the network that places the human and the non-human virus on a symmetrical plane of analysis, and I explain how affects, such as fear, anxiety, et cetera, are contagious and spread alongside diseases that reveal the networks that make up the social.

Can the Virus Speak? ²

The virus is the most elementary unit of information possible comprising a single- or double-stranded DNA or RNA molecule enclosed in a capsid coating. Viruses are abundant on the planet, and not all are pathogenic or cause diseases. In the late nineteenth century, Robert Koch, who popularised the ‘germ theory of disease’ and established the role of the virus as a pathogenic entity, even though it was invisible and could pass through filters that trapped bacteria (Cohen 2011: 15). The tobacco mosaic virus was the first virus made visible through the microscope in 1939. The elementary structure of the virus has been the subject of scientific interest, and in 1929, J. B. S. Haldane proposed that viruses might have played a key role in the ‘origin of life’ hypothesis. ³

Billions of years ago, the newly formed earth’s crust was covered in water and the atmospheric gases like carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia. Haldane proposed that the seeding of life on the planet unfolded through three progressive stages of chemical evolution (Tirard 2017: 736). Chemical evolution was initiated when the ultraviolet rays of the sun irradiated the pre-biotic soup of saline water and gases, which led to the formation of the organic molecules such as sugars and amino acids. The second stage was characterised by the appearance of large molecules capable of reproducing themselves. Finally, the appearance of cells, the basic unit of life, marked the last stage of evolution. Haldane concluded that the second stage of chemical evolution that lasted for millions of years was probably the niche occupied by viruses before the cell emerged as the unit of life (Tirard 2017: 736–8).

The discovery of the constituent nucleic acids of DNA molecules in the 1950s paved the way for the reclassification of life. A phylogenetic tree was established by comparing nucleic acids of common genes across organisms. The ‘tree of life’ presumed that common genes shared between non-human organisms and humans reflected an evolutionary kinship of descent from a common ancestor in the ancient past. The taxonomic ‘tree of life’ comprised three domains, namely Bacteria, Eukaryotes (organisms that have a membrane-enclosed nucleus, including all plants, animals and fungi) and Archaea. ⁴

The virus introduced two related sets of taxonomic problems. Is the virus alive? Does it represent the fourth domain of life, since it can infect organisms across the three domains? Haldane considered the virus as a living entity due to its pathogenic role. But viruses’ inability to replicate by themselves divided the scientific community, since the basic feature of cellular and species life is reproduction. An alternate to Haldane’s hypothesis of progressive emergence of cells from viral elements was proposed.

The reductive model or ‘escape hypothesis’ claimed that the virus resulted when the cell lost certain cellular organelles, such as ribosomes that were crucial to DNA replication (Claverie 2006). The loss of replication or translation machinery rendered the virus an inert element occupying the zone between life and non-life and dependent on the cellular machinery of host organisms in order to reproduce and make copies of itself. The escape hypothesis failed to demonstrate how cells would end up as viruses by losing their translation apparatuses (Claverie 2006).

Neither model has settled the debate of which came first—the virus or the cell. Thus, the virus is the part that stands in relation to the autonomous whole of the cell. In comparison to the elementary virus particle, the cellular organisms such as bacteria or eukaryotes are complex biological bureaucracies. Ironically, the cellular complexity of bacteria hinders its pathogenic capabilities. Consequently, bacterial epidemics are rare occurrences, in contrast to viral epidemics (Nguyen 2019: 157). The peculiar characteristic of viruses led Raoult and Forterre (2008) to reclassify all biological organisms into two groups. The first group, encompassing the three existing domains, is composed of the ribosome-encoding organisms that possess the cellular translation machinery to replicate DNA. The other group includes all capsid-encoding organisms or viruses. The claim that viruses constitute an independent domain of life (in addition to bacteria, archaea or eukaryotes) failed, due to the inconclusive status of the escape hypothesis, pitting the virus in its taxonomic ambiguous state between life and non-life.

Zoonoses and Becoming Animal

Viruses and bacteria cause disease by crossing the ‘species barrier’ of humans and animals. Zoonosis is the term for infectious human diseases caused by pathogens that have jumped from a non-human animal (usually a vertebrate) reservoir. When the spread is confined within the animal reservoir, the outbreaks are referred to as epizootic events (Keck et al. 2019: 6). Zoonotic events occur sporadically and usually do not trigger epidemics. The HIV/AIDS of the 1980s acquired epidemic proportions in humans, and DNA phylogenetic tracing identified the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) in chimpanzees that spilled over and mutated into HIV. Keck (2020) has explored the role of epidemiologists and virologists in tackling outbreaks of avian flu in China. He classifies epidemiologists as microbe ‘farmers’ (Keck 2020: 35), whose job involves the ‘prevention’ of disease outbreak. The microbiologist, on the other hand, is a ‘virus hunter’, whose task is to hunt for viruses out there in the wild (Keck 2020: 35). Keck says that by the 1990s, the narrative on the virus had shifted from invisible non-filterable particles to that of a mysterious entity lurking out there in the wild, aided by the notion that most emerging infectious diseases involved pathogenic viruses (Keck 2020: 4). In most cases, viral epidemics involved an animal host, such as bats (Ebola, SARS and COVID-19), chimpanzees (AIDS), camels (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS), mosquito (Zika), wild rats (Lassa virus), pigs and chickens (swine flu and avian flu, respectively). Surveillance and preparedness in anticipating the next outbreak is the primary task of the virologist. Anticipating the next viral infectious disease reveals a cascade of networks and agents through which disease outbreaks occur. In following the virus, the virologist has to often be in close proximity with animal hunters, who often reveal clues regarding epizootic events that often precede zoonotic outbreaks in humans. Keck compares the virologist to the shamanic hunter of ‘primitive’ or non-modern societies, wherein the shaman is a boundary-crosser (like the virus) invested with the power to manage uncertainties through the special ability to communicate between humans and animals (Keck 2020: 39–40).

The mimetic ability of the virus in commanding the host cellular machinery to make copies of itself can be extended to the hunter of non-Western indigenous communities. The cosmologies of non-modern societies do not operate through impermeable boundaries of human–animal and nature–culture Cartesian dualism. Willerslev (2007), in his study of the Yukaghirs of Siberia, points out the shamanic performance of the hunter in impersonating his prey. In Yukaghir cosmology, humans can take the personage of animals, rivers, mountains and spirits of dead ancestors through a mimetic pattern of mutual replication. Willerslev dismisses classifying these practices as animism or a primitive form of religious belief (Willerslev 2007: 10). A successful hunt rests on the mimetic ability of the hunter to imitate the prey by performing aural and bodily gestures that mesmerise and draw the animal close. The hunting strategies of copying and sensuous contact allow for the act of becoming animal which forms a key aspect of personhood among the Yukaghirs. Mimesis enables the hunter to exercise power over the prey even though the identification sustained is necessarily partial (Willerslev 2007: 10–11). Full identification is avoided, since it collapses the animal–human distinction. The subtle play of ‘difference and repetition’ across the permeable boundaries of humans and animals plays a crucial role in sustaining the livelihood of the Yukaghirs.

The trafficking of animal–human boundaries by viral particles is not necessarily unidirectional. Laine (2018) has demonstrated ‘reverse zoonosis’ of tuberculosis from humans to elephants in Southeast Asia as a result of increasing pressure from ecological tourism. Similarly, Cabalion et al. (2018) have explored the enigma of MERS in the Arabian Peninsula. The MERS virus jumped from bats to camels before settling on humans. But intriguingly, bats are absent in the Middle East. The coincidence of the popularity of camel racing events in the Middle East and the subsequent emergence of MERS has suggested that viruses travel in complex networks involving humans and non-humans. The amplifying factors of zoonotic diseases and inter-species entanglement forge an environmental milieu that concatenates entities, troubling the neat taxonomic-species boundaries of Western epistemology and the accompanying search for standalone factors, correlation and causes based on a single pathogen.

New disease-resistant viral pathogens are emerging from the rampant use of antibiotics in poultry and industrial-scale animal farms. The loss of biodiversity and species extinction accruing from extractive capitalist enterprises, such as mining, logging and land clearing for agriculture and animal husbandry, are forcing wild animals into close proximity to humans. Globalisation and air travel connecting far and distant places facilitate easy circulation of pathogens through circuits of trade and tourism. The illegal trade in wildlife and their increasing consumption for food, as pets and as ingredients in traditional medicine make wet markets an ideal place for spillover of viruses between humans and domestic and wild animals. In The Order of Things, Foucault (2002) cites Jorge Louis Borges, who found the strange Chinese encyclopaedia, whose classificatory principles were incomprehensible to Western thought. The virus needs to be located in this larger milieu of ‘(dis)order of things’ in order to trace the complex relationships, multiple actors and cascade of networks through which epidemics unfold.

Disease, Immunity and Biopolitics

It is the political sphere captured in the terms ‘epidemic’ and ‘epizootic’ that distinguishes human life (bios) from animal existence (zoe). In contrast to the zoe in epizootics or animal-borne diseases, an illness becomes an epidemic once it crosses the threshold of the political, across time and space, characterised by the demic—demos, or population. A pandemic encapsulates populations across many continents, and in the current case, it is a planetary phenomenon. The politico-jural enfolding of biology has been popularised by Foucault’s (1991) concept of governmentality and biopolitics. Biopolitics subsumes life to the modern arrangement of power reflected in states’ ability to control their population and make decisions regarding who should be allowed to live and who should die.

Kong (2019) argues that Foucauldian biopolitics is a useful framework for analysing disease governance. Each Foucauldian biopolitical mechanism of exercising power emerged in conjunction with a corresponding disease (Kong 2019: 375). Sovereign power negotiated leprosy through the regime of expulsion from the city. The plague of the Middle Ages in Europe led to the practice of quarantining and the emergence of disciplinary power. Modern regimes of biopower secure populations through inoculation and vaccination. Thus, expelling the leper, quarantining the plague-afflicted and eradicating small pox and polio through vaccination were measures to control diseases that simultaneously operated as strategies of power. Foucault’s arrangements of power are not a successive linear trajectory, and the traces of infection of earlier regimes appear in subsequent ones. For example, the term ‘lazaretto’ became popular in the quarantine measures of the seventeenth century. ‘Lazaretto’, or a hospital for those afflicted with contagious diseases, recalls the lazar or the leper and Lazarus, of ancient Christianity, brought back from dead. The absence of a vaccine for COVID-19 causes us to fall back on strategies of isolation and quarantine practices that emerged in the regime of disciplinary power. The mysterious COVID-19 portrays the coronavirus (aptly named for its spikes that resemble a crown) as a sovereign whose unpredictable behaviour has led democratic governments to impose unthinkable authoritarian and draconian measures to tackle the ‘state of exception’.

Lorenzini (2020) argues that racism is a manifestation of biopolitical power that parses the biological continuum identifying specific bodies that can be killed. The colonisation of the Americas, which serves as a possible marker of the Anthropocene, was achieved through the introduction of small pox, chicken pox, bubonic plague, et cetera. These diseases were the bioweapons that the modern West used, willingly or otherwise, to perpetrate genocide on indigenous communities of the ‘new world’ and in turn appropriate land and geological resources. Understanding of infectious disease and practices of colonialism went hand in hand. Arnold (1993) states that Western medicine formed a destructive part of the colonising process, and indigenous bodies became a site of colonial power in the attempt to shore up Western medicine’s treatment of small pox, cholera and plague. Roy (2017: 153) has investigated how malaria, before its etiology was known, was a ‘game of relationships’, including plants, bodies, insects, drugs and other notable entities. The British sourcing of botanical quinine for treating malaria entailed a simultaneous co-production of therapy and capitalist drug production that saw increased colonial penetration of corporeal bodies and geographical territories. ⁵ Writing in the context of tea estates in Assam, Dey (2017) demonstrates how the treatment of kala azar, cholera and malaria were not necessarily governed by the objective scientific treatment of diseased bodies but were influenced by legal and commercial profiteering concerns, preoccupied with maintaining the productivity of labouring bodies.

In the modern period, racism projects diseases onto certain bodies, thereby creating hierarchies between different human groups. For example, the Nazi regime considered the Jews, gypsies and homosexuals as the diseased ‘other’ that had to be eliminated in order to ensure the purity of the German race. The Nazi biopolitical extremes resulted in the concentration camp as a zone of exception from the law for turning bios into zoe that requires an exploration of the trope of immunity.

The medical concept of biological immunity or the inherent capacity of an organism to fight infections can be traced to the late nineteenth century. According to Cohen (2009), the term immunity generates a paradox. In legal parlance, immunity means maintaining lawful exceptions to the law in order to ensure the law can be applied without exception, on everyone. Immunity in its non-medical usage ‘lubricates the ineluctable friction between law and politics’ (Cohen 2009: 5). Thus, the sovereign imposes the law but is immune or above the law. The modern Westphalian system of nation states maintains peace and eschews war through the figure of the diplomat who has ‘diplomatic immunity’ and stands above the law of the country. The shift from immunity as exception to the law to immunity as defence in biomedicine incorporates the paradox: where there is immunity, defence is unnecessary, and where defence is deemed essential, immunity is absent, as in the case of AIDS patients whose immune system is compromised by HIV (Cohen 2009: 5). Immunity in biomedicine thus naturalises defence as an inherent capability of an organism to fight external threats. Thus, the concept of immunity presumes autonomous bounded entities with strict borders, be it a microscopic cell, an organism or a macroscopic nation state.

Esposito (2013) has commented on the double bind of immunitary logic by exploring the relationship between community, immunity and biopolitics. The immune mechanism that characterised the Nazi regime was obsessed with the logic of racial hygiene and self-protection that involved identifying and eliminating the external threat. Immunity protects and sustains life, but if it crosses a critical threshold, it can kill the organism through immune overdrive reactions or cytokine storm.

The Nazi regime was also marked by the obverse immunitary logic of self-destruction, the equivalent of a cytokine reaction. The regime issued orders for self-destruction (not to be captured alive, as in the case of Hitler) when defeat was imminent. Deaths due to COVID-19 have occurred primarily due to cytokine storms generated by the body to contain the infection. Paradoxically, in trying to defend the body from the ravages of the virus, the immune overdrive kills the patient, reducing the political life (bios) to bare life (zoe). Thus, the idea of immunity as defence reveals that an ‘immune organism becomes a biopolitical life form through and through’ (Cohen 2009: 7).

The conflation of racism, virus and immunitary logic results in the biopolitical mutating into contemporary concerns of biosecurity, increasingly articulated through the imaginary of new infectious-disease threats. The complacency stemming from the successful elimination of small pox and polio led W. H. Stewart to claim that the era of infectious diseases that lasted from the 1950s to the 1970s was finally over (Kong 2019: 371). The celebrations were short-lived. The end of the Cold War, the onset of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and the 9/11 terror attack shifted the discourse to ‘emerging infectious diseases’, and of particular concern were ‘emerging viruses’ that came from foreign bodies (Kong 2019: 373). The 1995 Sarin gas incident in the Tokyo subway made the threat of bioterrorism very real. War became integral to life that saw the dovetailing of biomedicine and biosecurity concerns. What if the last remaining secured samples of small pox and polio diseases fell into wrong hands? Paradoxically, the ‘biological turn’ in American foreign policy, post 9/11, saw increased funding for research on bio-defence (Cooper 2008). Experiments were initiated to create novel infectious agents or more virulent forms of existing pathogens. The virus played a key role in the imaginary of bioweapons.

Certain specific characteristics of the virus, such as its ability to ‘hijack’ the host’s cellular machinery and ‘recruit’ cellular organelles to make copies in ‘viral factories’ which overwhelmed the host organism, suddenly found metaphoric parallels in terrorist organisations. Literally translated as ‘the base’, the term al-Qaeda evoked the idea of a cell or virus, the simplest organisational unit operating independently through ‘sleeper cells’ that could be activated at an opportune moment and if unchecked could multiply and wreak havoc in the body politic of a nation state. The SARS epidemic of 2003 was metaphorically seen as Asia’s 9/11 moment, when airborne virus using airplanes terrorised populations across the world. During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Hindu represented the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the Sikh community in Afghanistan through a cartoon published on 26 March 2020 that visualised the Islamic terrorists as gun-wielding, spiked coronaviruses. ⁶ Similarly, the fear, anxiety and paranoia generated by a group of COVID-19-infected Islamic religious pilgrims of the Tablighi Jamaat in Delhi did not hide the easy suspicion in the mainstream media, of the Muslim body being a simultaneous source of potential threat conflating both the virus and the terrorist. ⁷

The onset of an epidemic, as in the case of COVID-19, involves the search for a scapegoat or the diseased other, such as ‘Chinese’ or ‘Muslim’, identified with spreading the contagion. The virus and the diseased other as scapegoat fit Derrida’s use of the polysemic Greek term ‘pharmakon’. The pharmakon troubles the boundary between life and death and connotes a drug that is both poison and cure (Johnson 1981: xxiv–xxv). The virus is potentially a ‘pharmakon’, which can both kill and save life. Developing life-saving vaccines entails introducing an attenuated form of the virus (that kills) to make a vaccine (that cures). The weakened virus, when introduced into the human body, generates antibodies in the immune system that defend against the particular disease in the near future. Paradoxically, the recovered Tablighi Jamaat patients in Delhi were sought out for plasma donation, since they contained antibodies that could potentially save the lives of critical patients of COVID-19, thereby collapsing the literal and metaphorical readings of virus and the human ‘other’.

From the Social to the Viral

The pandemic reveals that the social world is composed of networks. Contact tracing of the COVID-19-afflicted demonstrates how the state and health agencies monitor the potential and afflicted patients. Who did they meet? Where did they visit? What did they touch? The actor’s interactions reveal the network or sociality. Conversely, if we follow the topology of the network, then the various actors stand revealed. This reassembling of the social needs to be understood through concepts other than ‘social-structure’ and ‘social-system’ that prove inadequate in capturing the complex, interconnected world we live in.

Gabriel Tarde’s concept of ‘monad’ is instructive in understanding the re-composition of the social that the pandemic entails. ⁸ Contrary to Durkheim’s claim that social facts are things, Tarde claimed ‘all things are society’ (Tarde 2012, cited in Latour 2002: 120). Consequently, various forms of collectives, such as stars, planets, viruses, galaxies, humans, et cetera, can be called societies. For Tarde, the monad is the most elementary form of material existence. Thus, the virus and the human are both monads of their larger collectives. The reason we fail to comprehend Tarde’s monads as the basic structure of all material existence of the universe is because humans themselves are constituents of their own societies and can view their collective from within, unlike societies of viruses, gases, stars, et cetera that we can observe from afar (Latour 2002: 120). Moreover, human societies are composed of fewer aggregate elements, unlike the billions in the case of non-human monads. The social of the human comprises only a few monads that reveal a set of networks or paths of connection. These paths get erased as repetitions induced by habits and custom stabilise, congeal or naturalise the network.

The monad is characterised by ‘faith and desire’, or its ability to possess and form associations with other monads (Latour 2002: 19). The fidelity and purpose of the virus is to make copies of itself, but only in association with another monadic host organism. The ability of monads to forge a stable associative assemblage that includes humans and non-humans is what Tarde would identify as the social. The assemblage is temporary and can decompose, because monads can associate with other monads in a different capacity.

The monadic emphasis on relationality raises the question of what spreads in the network. Networks make contagions possible, or conversely, contagions create networks. In the context of epidemics, things are contaminated with emotions, sensations, affects, moods and feelings, and excessive connectivity spreads fear and anxiety, alongside diseases. Sampson (2012) characterises the spread of contagious affects as ‘virality’. Avoiding a metaphoric or analogical reading from epidemiology or immunology, Sampson claims that virality is ‘all about forces of relational encounters in the social field’ (Sampson 2012: 4). He suggests the social is composed of two kinds of virality, molar and molecular (Sampson 2012: 5–6).

The molar virality is related to the stabilisation of affects through discursive and biopolitical arrangements of power (Sampson 2012: 5). Thus, the flows of contaminating influences turn into strategies of governance and reveal new forms of subjects and subjectivity in the making. For example, the Indian prime minister’s plea to citizens to clang utensils and light lamps, in honour of the medical fraternity tackling COVID-19, at a designated space and time channelised the contagious affective mood of the nation into a disciplined order of a collective ritual that could not be questioned. Similarly, wearing masks, practising ‘social distancing’ and washing hands with soap are all strategies of power that reign in the affective emotions of the individual through the discourse of personal hygiene and safety. Sampson locates the molecular virality in the pre-discursive field of accidents and spontaneous desires that are yet to be brought into the realm of molar categories of order, such as the recoil from an accidental touch, the need to resist spitting, sneezing, coughing, et cetera (Sampson 2012: 6). The molar and molecular can fold into each other, stabilise into assemblages or unravel into new associations. Thus, contagion and networks have refocused attention on the affective that constitutes the social, alongside providing a symmetrical framework that places the anthropos and the virus in the same plane of analysis.

Conclusion

In a fictionalised anthropo-scene, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (2014) posit the collapse of human civilisation somewhere around 2063. Unabated climate change causes the Western Antarctica Ice Shelf to collapse, unleashing a planetary chain of events with massive economic, social and political consequences. Rising sea levels precipitate the mass migration of more than a billion people. Nearly 60%–70% of all existing species are extinct. A second Black Death pandemic appears in Europe, and the Yersinia pestis bacterium spreads the plague across Asia and North America, achieving a mortality rate of its Middle Age predecessor that had killed nearly half of the world’s population. The inland and mountain-dwelling populations of Asia, Europe and North and South America survive, and populations of Africa and Australia are wiped out. In 2090, Japanese researcher Akari Ishikawa creates a symbiotic genetic hybrid of a lichen and fungus in a laboratory, called Pannaria ishikawa, that absorbs atmospheric CO2 at levels higher than any existing biological organism. Thus, where governments showed policy paralysis in addressing climate change, a maverick scientist stumbles upon a solution to environmental recovery (Oreskes and Conway 2014: 29–33).

The scary hypothetical vignette brings together the discourse of climate change and pandemic but ignores the virus as an actor. As polar ice caps melt, more and more novel viruses will emerge, implying more pandemics in the near future. The COVID-19 pandemic collapses the micro-world of the invisible virus and the macro-dimensions of the hyper-visible climate change. The COVID-19-causing coronavirus and environmental pollution ravage our lungs, affecting our ability to breathe. Paradoxically, the pandemic-induced lockdowns and the corresponding cessation of economic activities have led to a decrease in air pollution, allowing us to breathe better.

The virus is ‘good to think’ with and unravels the bio-logic and binary dichotomies of bios/geos, life/death and non-life/life that underpin our epistemology. Climate change does not recognise sovereign territorial boundaries, just as the virus does not respect corporeal boundaries or national boundaries, emerging from a local event in China and transforming into a planetary pandemic. The metaphor of warfare that organises our immunity and perceives the virus as an invader is predicated on the idea of politically sovereign nation states which entails maintaining strict boundaries between the self and the other. The virus unravels the concept of autonomous, bounded organisms by revealing porosity and interconnectedness and relationality as mechanisms through which life evolves. Bacteria, viruses, fungi, et cetera are symbiont kin or ‘companion species’ (Haraway 2008) of humans, on account of the phylogenetic similarity of genes we possess in common. Viral diseases enhance our evolutionary adaptability by conferring antibody resistance and cellular evolution, and our future depends on learning to live with them. To rephrase Latour (1993), the virus reveals that ‘we have never been human’. By questioning human exceptionalism that maintains dominance over other species of nature, the virus reveals a social that is forged through ‘partial connections’ of human and non-human entities. The framework of social fact (Durkheim), social action (Weber) and social relations (Marx) structured on the nature/culture opposition proves inadequate to comprehend the complex, interconnected network of the virus and the human that is forged through the pandemic and climate change. It propels us to explore alternate non-Western ‘animistic’ epistemologies to learn how to form monadic associations with other bios, zoe and geos, thereby revealing the delicate networks that sustain life on the planet. Alternative cosmologies or knowledge traditions may offer solutions to mitigate climate change and better understand the prevalence of diseases and their transmission across species barriers. The pandemic induced fear, anxiety and vulnerability, and its affective contagious molar and molecular flows can serve as the ‘dress rehearsal’ (Latour 2020) that can galvanise action in overcoming the lethargy, paralysis and inertia that afflict climate crisis. The ‘anthro-pause’ of the COVID-19 pandemic may offer us the last chance to make the right kind of future choices in order to reverse the march to the sixth mass extinction of planetary life that the Anthropocene heralds. If climate change in the near future leads to extinction of planetary life, it is the inert virus that harbours hope of the ‘second coming’ of life on the planet.