A Contagious Living Fluid: Objectification and Assemblage in the History of Virology  

Oleh:

Loon, Joost van

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Theory, Culture & Society vol. 19 no. 5-6 (Okt. 2002), page 107–124.
Topik: assemblage; objectification; technoscience; virology; virtual object; virus
Fulltext: 107TCAS195-6.pdf (72.83KB)

Isi artikel

This article deals with the birth of 'the virus' as an object of technoscientific analysis. The aim is to discuss the process of objectification of pathogen virulence in virological and medical discourses. Through a short excursion into the history of modern virology, it will be argued that far from being a matter of fact, pathogen virulence had to be 'produced', for example in petri-dishes, test-kits and hyper-real signification-practices. The now commonly accepted objective status of 'the virus' has been an accomplishment of a complex ensemble of actors. Indeed, this illustrates why objectification rather than objectivity has become the main focus of science and technology studies. The objectification of 'the' virus was by no means a smooth process. It involved more than five decades of highly speculative and fragmented research projects before it became actualized as a separate discipline under the heading of virology. The specific objectification of viruses took place through an inter-disciplinary de-differentiation of research questions, methodologies, techniques and technologies. The main argument of this article is that viruses only became intelligible after the establishment of a virology-assemblage. Its inauguration in the early 1950s was radical and sudden because only then could the various substrands of virological technoscience affect each other through deliberate enrolment, and engender a universal intelligibility.

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