Major and Minor Virality

Our virus infects the human and creates our image in him. —William S. Burroughs, Nova Express¹

The distinction between major and minor virality is not a simple matter of quantification. A major virality is not “major” by virtue of the number of infected. Major and minor do not function to distinguish between pandemics and local outbreaks according to a numerical threshold of cases. When I describe something as major, I also do not mean that it is a majority by virtue of having a higher relative quantity than that which is minor or “the minority.” Instead — and here I am drawing wholeheartedly on Deleuze and Guattari — what is major or minor is a matter of function, organization, and therefore necessarily political power and its distribution also.

Deleuze and Guattari invoke language and dialect as their main examples for this distinction, and it is worth joining them in this. When the ruling forces of England after 1066 spoke French, French was the major language in England, despite the relative scarcity of speakers of French against the vast quantity of the population who spoke with Old English, Cornish, Welsh, etc., as “minor” languages, for these tongues did not give a defining identity for the political status quo. Rather, their minority (and therefore the majority) was produced as a function of their feudal domination.

Famously, we can see this division built into Modern English — that is, “modern” in the sense that the English spoken today exists after English became a major language, having murderously suppressed its Celtic neighbours’ tongues, in making itself a majority in Eire, Kernow, Cymru, etc. The distinctions built into Modern English are materially produced on the level of class stratifications — for example, between the etymologies of those words that refer to the livestock one worked with versus the eventual meat-product that was consumed (and rarely by the peasantry). The cow (sharing roots from the Germanic Kuh) is worked on; the beef (from the French bœuf) is consumed. One can name additional examples, such as the prejudice against African American Vernacular English, or the very existence of “High German” or “received pronunciation” as “the Queen’s English.” The majority-function is a function of the production and reproduction of a status, against which other tendencies, potentials, or becomings are rendered as minor.

The proletariat are not the major term of the world system, despite their quantitative outnumbering of their oppressors who set the terms of order, who erect themselves as the major, the dominant and dominating part of the capitalist system. The bourgeoisie in this binary are the overcoding term: that part which unifies, i.e., captures, the proletariat within the function of selling their labor where they have nothing else; and this part enacts this function by ongoing processes of dispossession and accumulation enacted upon the quantitatively gargantuan masses of humanity (and all other life on this planet). A majority does not become a minority by being outnumbered, but only through the deposing and de-activation of the political machineries by which it is able to produce itself as the dominant coding of the material world — that is, of the territory in which it determines the status quo and the corresponding subjectivity of that code. The major is the dominant and dominating function or set of functions of a social-political system, material on the objective level of institutions, distributions of resources, etc., and subjective in that it structures predominant modes of language, communicative sense, and consciousness according to schemas of subjectivity, which are expressions of these dominant social codes. 

Having introduced the notion of the major here, I argue that a major virality — understood as a function in terms of the operations it carries out — is a virus of domination: of the production of authority of its code and of the reproduction of this authority-code. The most explicit viral image of this would be the image of the virus that reduces an organism into a thing that exists simply for the sake of reproducing this virus by producing more virions, but a retroviral image would also be adequate insofar as we explain these viral and retroviral movements according to the same function. Namely, in the case of a major virality, both images would depict the rewriting of the organism in terms of the violent imposition of a limit to the being it is attached to. The first virus reduces the creative and operational potential of the cell to the production of virions, exhausting it unto death. The latter (major) retrovirus would be the transcription of a code into the receiving body, which overwrites, restricts, or deletes existing codes in such a manner that the range of activities and functions said body can enact becomes limited by the additional code — it adds in order to subtract. Codes are replicated for the sake of a reproduction of the major, and the reproduction of the society coded by the same major tendencies. Majority is a product, not its original producer, and yet it nonetheless plays a part in its own reproduction through a menagerie of machineries at its disposal — like those of the factories, amongst which are the machineries of major virality.

Viral social reproduction needs its viruses, its codes, to distribute. As the great tradition of socialist-feminist social reproduction theory has demonstrated, the prime examples lie in the cases of the family as the unit of social reproduction and of the codification of gender roles established in terms of a gendered division of labor as well as the policing of both before a major standard (that is, heteronormative and cisnormative). Calm. I am not calling anyone’s mother or father, daughter or son, nan, grandad, second cousin, etc., a disease. I will not call for any sense of “cure,” nor would I care to communicate in such a register. Virality is not in and of itself malicious or “bad,” nor does every virality produce pathogenesis (which is a question of utility and ultimately one of value). Think less of any loved ones and more about the politics of family values that gets shored up in the face of social crises. The major family-virus is a virus of archetype, breaking that word down into its components of archē as principle or command and the type as category. The category exists for the sake of judgement; of identifying X under the category Y, which stabilizes this identification. All categories are bordered, universal, for all X, such that X is in category Y and thus holds the predicate denoted by said category. Unmarried men are bachelors confined by the rigidity of the definition, but it is not as if this boundary has required much reinforcement. However, those confined within the coding of a category — such as a major standard of masculinity, femininity, binary gender or sexual dimorphisms, racial categories, categories of the ‘normal’, etc. — are actively confined insofar as the borders are socially, politically, and economically — that is to say, materially — stratified. It is not that such structures are always necessarily experienced as confinement; regardless, there is a real material consequence to stepping outside of them, be it a loss of material support in the act of departure (not qualifying for any or inadequate welfare, healthcare, the support of other family members etc.), or with the additional active persecution of those who blur or transgress the category (including those categorized as abnormal for the sake of that very persecution).² 

The communication of the standard — that is, the inherently political majority — familial unit has gone viral, or rather, has been virally active for centuries as distributed through patriarchal legal codes, colonial-cultural violence, and religious-conservative orthodoxies. A system communicates this standard to adults in the hope that they will produce children, who will be communicated the values of family in a dual motion of social and parental transmission. This process is itself made of gendering, sexuating viruses, which code the body into a given ‘biological’ functionality and social role. One’s sex and gender are assigned, written of someone as judgement, as categorical statement, as a “stable” identification (and indeed, often inscribed upon their bodies surgically in the assignment of intersex infants). That the Fascisti of today mobilize themselves around transphobia is also partially a terror of the rewriting of the already minor potentialities of language, which exceed the major and lay dormant within its composition. This can be seen in the political mobilization against “pronouns,” or the active effort to prevent people from changing their gender or sex markers on official documents (which ultimately have no immediate necessity to be recording such categories at all), such as driving licences, passports, banking, etc. It is not that the transphobes are protective of grammar as such, that they are linguistic prescriptivists, but that they fear the disruption of the safe confinement of the codes that stabilize the territory of social experience (including their own). Society constantly communicates one’s gender, one’s sex, and even one’s family to one’s self through the address, the name, the assumed pronoun, etc., and intensifies the process of rewriting one’s coding through the insertion of such limiting codes constantly (blue for boys, pink for girls; boys play X, girls play Y). The categories become second nature, habit, part of the community of communication to which sense is limited in terms of these codes (or rather, which these codes attempt to limit). 

To speak of processes of virality is not to automatically commit oneself to pathologization, reducing the output of a viral process to disease. The paradigm of the understanding of virality here is that of informatics, and there is no need to retreat back to Koch and work backwards from the disease to the effectuating viral matter. This is not a discourse of health, but a discourse of code, inscription, and hegemony via the functional relationships of communication and the viral process. To be content and flourishing within one’s own gender or sex assignment from birth is not, therefore, being described as a disease any more than having a happy relationship with one’s parents is, or indeed being a parent. It is not the case that people have been totally captured and turned into viral automata — for all viral communication is a matter of degree anyway… — nor is it the case that they have been necessarily “duped” into total identification with any function assigned to them. Even at a higher degree of comfort, integration, resonance, or adequation to a major code, the major code remains as an abstraction, a universal, and every body is particular. People are not piloted by the codes retrovirally communicated to them; rather, they are supplemented by them. No one simply serves to produce and reproduce the universal in their lives, for neither we nor our actions are reducible to code any more than we are reducible to genetic codes and to our mere capacities for action as individuals. Each individual also enjoys and expends the particularity, the life-time, of their own finite existence, and we will never achieve any infinite equivalence or permanent reduction of ourselves to a concept, or even to language itself. People always hold their unnameable, unique ownness, which resists their total disappearance into universals such as “The People.”

The surplus-value of code — the explosive plasticity, the possibility of mutation — always maintains an active resistance against total subsumption to varying degrees, and the plasticity that our bodily capture and inscription presupposes is never exhausted entirely, insofar as the capture and reproduction thereof actively presupposes it. Major viruses are not impervious to mutation by which minorities can, and often do, indeed flow out of them (to return to the examples of the majority of English and the minorities of slang). To live as a man is not to be the category “man,” and the virality of man-as-a-virus is not the same as any one man, but is instead the process by which man as the major, dominating function of a binary system is produced and reproduced in a heteropatriarchal society. Therefore, whilst I disagree with Xandra Metcalfe when she claims that cissexuality is the “true social pathogen,” it is predominantly on the level of the technicality that detaches virality from pathology.³ 

There is no need to pathologize (or even pathologically moralize) now that virality can be understood in terms of an informatics of code and a dynamic of communicative forces. The task, however, is to politicize the distribution of codes and the imposition of limits by major viral processes. The major virus encodes in order to limit that which it rewrites, inscribing a delimited function that operates by proliferating said code in a process of viral replication, itself serving the ends of reproducing the stability of a social system. Major viruses add code for the sake of bounding the potential of a body by organizing it around an additional function of replicating and transmitting that code. 

Contrastingly, what I term a minor virality similarly adds or rewrites code in order to subtract from an order that constitutes it as a subjected or subjugated pole of a social binary: that introduces an element of subtraction from the majority, which renders it minor. Where the major virus adds code for the sake of bounding potentiality in the form of a limit, a minor virality adds or rewrites code such that limit-codes are weakened, deactivated, or rendered mutable. There is a preciously continental philosophical pun to be made here to summarize the difference. Major viralities infect in supplementing a delimitation of possibility, whereas minor virality is the de-limiting of that which opens up possibilities through the insertion of a de-limiting code, which may even accelerate code-mutation by removing obstacles to communication with other minor, oppressed codes. Minor virality subtracts the unifying, limited element that domination encodes. A virus is minor as that which produces lysis, rupture, of the limits encoded by the major forces. Fanon declares at the beginning of his decolonial project of psychoanalytic subtraction that he seeks “a complete lysis of this morbid body.”⁴

The first recorded minor virus was written down in order to defuse it by rendering it comedic: Virus Lysistrata — the virus communicated through the minority of women within all the realms of Greece, so that the military capacities of the major stratum of Man would grind to a halt while those women who accepted the code of Lysistrata occupied the Acropolis. Lysistrata names the virus of solidarity and tactical excellence that comprehends the unity of economies of desire and of finance, of social reproduction and the cybernetics of patriarchy. In occupying the Athenian treasury at the same time as they began an indefinite sex strike, the women of all warring lands succeeded in severing the flows of libidinal and financial investment at the same time as withholding the labor of social-sexual reproduction. It took a dialectician’s intervention, brought in by Aristophanes, in the form of the Goddess of “Reconciliation,” who halts the narrative of resistance, such that everyone goes back to their original roles. Yet there can be no such reconciliation with the Major today, none with the forces that govern our world: extermination or communism is the choice.⁵

The enemies, the fascists, the phobes, do not understand minor virality very well (and yet enough to be terrified by it); instead, they render their objects-to-be-destroyed in major viral terms, as a minority competing for the major position of the dominant end of a constructed binary system. For example, the recurring reactionary fear that gay or trans people are “reproducing” themselves via “social contagion” — that is, by their very public existence as well as working in schools, etc. — is an admission of the major virality of their own mode of cisheteronormative-familial (apologies to whoever is doing the audiobook, even if it’s myself) social reproduction. Their fearful analysis is grounded on the admission of virality as well as a capitalistic framing of competition, as if there were competing brands in a child-producing industry. Indeed, this is what heteropatriarchy has so often constructed and reduced people with wombs to: matrimonially appropriated means of production.

The assault on queer community is an assault on the inherent queerness of communication, the death of authority before the inevitability and the inherency of difference, which exceeds any univocal “essence,” presenting itself as simultaneously genetic (in the sense of both genes and of being innately tied to the origin of the organism) and immutable. The enemy looks at a can of beer endorsed by a trans celebrity and, supplemented by the major virus of cisgender supremacy, enters a state of immunological shock. This is because, for them, any degree of the communication of queer codes is itself enough to risk the spread of a minor virus, which detaches those whom it encounters from the limits imposed by, for example, mandatory, permanent gender assignments. Before cisheteronormative and familial modes of social reproduction, any other code becomes pathogenetic. It becomes the source of a social “disease” insofar as it is seen as a threat to the dominant codes, according to which the flow of future humans are to be produced in the reproduction of society — of the future workers and fresh functionaries of capital, especially the human capital, which we all are under neoliberalism. It is human capital that intensifies its regime in the contemporary data economy, where everything can become capital as content, and therefore can be produced as data for a personal brand that feeds back upon us in the addictive production of New Flesh.

What is major or hegemonic in societal ordering can issue viral transmissions from itself in the form of an immune response. The use of viruses against viruses has been one of the most viral revolutions in medicine: cowpox against smallpox, etc., “chickenpox parties” of exposure and the like, and even the COVID boosters that have saved so many from that choking hell. I am not talking about vaccines but major viruses of word and image, which supplement social communications with additional senses and imaginaries that mark minorities out for targeting, isolation and/or active destruction, encoding them with markers hostile to their ability to communicate, to be in community, with others. Antisemitism, for example, is just such a virus, where the antisemite attacks the image circulated of the Jewish person. The racist caricature is the additional coding, the viral supplement built into the communicative fabric of an antisemitic culture or intensified through the circulation of viral communications, which infect experiences of the world with codes of pre-judgement.⁶

We can see today where the channeling and coding of semioviral flows of sense and media function as a device of stochastic terrorism. One need only look to the ways in which expressions of solidarity with Palestinians against genocide by the Israeli state have been the object of an attempt by Western media outlets to overcode them with the supplement that renders them as “terrorists” identical with Hamas. With this viral supplement pumped out through columns and legacy media, the aim is to delegitimize resistance at the same time as it legitimizes them as a target for attack (as the label “terrorist” so typically functions). Semioviral flows coded by hegemonic forces are an immunological response to a resistance that refuses the meaning given by the consensus of the day.

When systems come under pressure in the reproduction of society, and in response to minor communication (which in public life is even the merest visibility to society), hegemonic communications systems — such as the right-wing, liberal, and even elements of the “leftist” press, bitter about their own political irrelevance — issue their own word-viral transmissions in the form of gay and trans panics (not that the two are in any way separable from the perspective of minority). One of the most egregious examples of this was the encoding of an actual virus, HIV, as a “gay plague,” invoking a sense of punishment for “immorality,” and the attempt to spread virally the encoding that queer identity is a matter of reproduction not of the child, but through the child in the ongoing panics over “exposure” to such codes. The most famous immunofascistic practices, however, have always been genocidal, be it in the rewriting of the souls of millions via the major viral processes built into colonial schooling (for example, the residential schools in Canada, but essentially any colonial education system), or the burning of the Institute for Sexual Science in Germany in the 1930s and its library, from which we do not yet know if queer knowledges in Europe have recovered. 

In the latter case, it is important to highlight that the fascists did not burn books because they were books  —  i.e., because they hated the idea of communicative knowledge that the idea of a book represents — but rather because of what these books could do by virtue of what is coded in their pages. There is a liberal, Orwellian idea, touted by ideologues of the current “free” press, that books and literature — the mere presence of ideas and difference among them as manifest in a given plurality of books — inherently stand for some kind of free exchange of information and ideas simply by virtue of being books. However, as private items and commodities alone, they cannot stand for anything other than an exchange value. A bookshop can stand for this to a degree: yes, a book promoting such ideas can stand for those ideas in turn, but it acquires that supplemental coding from its production and its social relations in order to do so. For a book to stand for access to knowledge and open flows of information beyond this value, it requires social relations of social ownership — a commonly owned library, perhaps. But even then, the book no longer needs to “represent” anything, for its existence is a function of those very relations, which make those ideas actualities, actual powers manifest in material configurations of our lives as a reading public.

So, the enemy did not burn Hirschfeld’s library because of their hatred for learning generally, but as an immunological measure. Every book was a virion, a means of supplementing the code of the reader in such a manner that their possibilities of becoming expanded beyond the code-confines of the present, or even allowed them to better understand the codes, feelings, interpretations of their own bodies and consciousness, which they had already been living with beyond the codes of the norm. 

Yet even this analysis is deficient, as the genocidal violence of the destruction of the Institute for Sexual Science was not simply an attack on books, but on all media of communication, which bore such codes — notably, the vast collection of photographs of homosexual, transgender, and intersex subjects as a documentation of the LGBTQI subculture of Germany at the time. All of these were communicators that, in their own way, answered Spinoza’s question of “what can a body do?”, and they answered beyond the imposed limits that the major viralities had failed to write out of them. For this, they were targeted as a social disease, antagonistic to the production of “pure,” “healthy” society, and thus marked for destruction. Photographic panels, which held such photos for the sake of educating wider audiences beyond the specialized tomes of scientific research written by Hirschfeld et al., were equally the targets of the Nazi raiding parties.⁷ That vast amounts of questionnaires — which bore the personal recordings of the lives of so many trans, intersex, and gay subjects — survived, as Heike Bauer notes, was due to the impracticality of disassembling that section of the archive. The enemy believed their spectacle of semiotic destruction to be enough.⁸

The enemy has failed to eliminate the codes that terrified them in Germany in the 1930s, and they will not cease to fail. The data-production lines that have made possible the New Flesh have also allowed for an active and minor mutation of the archive as such. A major archive is the presence and recording of stratified and sanctioned data, arranged and edited according to categories that form inputs as they are catalogues and stored within. A minor archive — which we may playfully call an an-archive — gathers and presents transformations, productions and demonstrations of mutability, rather than a catalogue of the immutable. I do not speak of this concept as an author thereof, but as a transmitter and a receiver of the notion of a “viral” or “everywhere” archive from Mel Y. Chen’s work on gender transition in the age of cyberspace and of YouTube. Chen highlights examples of archives made by Asian transgender men, which demonstrate the (an-)archival potentials of transition rendered online, for the ways each 

presume, in their own ways, that identities are not preset. They are live, constructed, presentist, futurist, real. In their dynamism, their virtuality, their interconnectedness, their evanescence, their craft, and their readiness, these archives might be thought of as viral: not alive, since digital; not dead, since mobile. They are not archived reliably, and so they must be concocted again and again; even if identity itself is forestalled and forestalled and forestalled, the archives make and make.⁹ 

These an-archives transmit transformation without delimiting it in advance. It is this transmission, this virality, of subtraction for the sake of transformation, which allows for the promise of transformative self-determination. This promise is not made with any certainty of escape from that which would prevent its fulfilment, yet it presents us with a relative degree of what is possible under the Corporate Platform Complex that constitutes cyberspace under capitalism — of a transformation of the New Flesh. This is not the promise of cyberspace as it was first iterated — that is, as it was sold to us. There is no freshly discovered digital continent upon which we may find our new, true selves. There is only transmission and mutation, against the confinement of control. 

Major virality aims to produce us as information and immunize the social body against deformity, in the sense of the rupture of the forms of social production and reproduction. It is a concept that highlights a set of tools, orientations, or tendencies that embrace deformation as transformation. Resistance, not reconciliation. The task of the New Flesh is to refuse Aristophanes’ immunological defacement of the Lysistrata virus, instead virally arresting the flows of capital, to expand the an-archive and to maximize the transmissibility of its transformations through the communization of cyberspace. The communization of cyberspace is not the communization of another world, but a part of our world. To communize cyberspace is to begin a process of abolition against the social relations that render it what it is today: those of capitalist production. What is online is not a new territory, but an intensive mapping, a product of the world. It is not a space of the possible, but something very much actual in its structure — that is, the real material infrastructure of the economies of data and the new circuitries of imperialism. If it cannot be communized, then let it collapse under the weight of its own transformations, let loose upon the digital world, across the semioviral flows of resistance. The question whether the New Flesh can be emancipated, or whether we should be emancipated from the circuits that render us as New Flesh, is a matter of politics before it is a matter of mere technology. For now, in the melee of meaning that manifests in our discursive and strategic contestations, both online and offline, let a thousand minor viralities bloom.

The New Flesh: Life and Death in the Data Economy is out now with Zero Books.

Images: Frank Ockenfels 3