Human-Viral Hybrids as Challenge to the Outbreak Narrative and Neo-Liberal Biopolitics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article starts with Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent supposition that the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the precarious foundations of the Western developed and progressive societies, laying bare the mechanism of their biopolitical regime. Following Nancy’s argument, the article draws first on the example of a few recently published French Corona Fictions which depict contagion as one of many, tightly entangled factors, mostly of an anthropogenic nature. From this perspective, the article then offers a close reading of two speculative pandemic fictions fabulations of the turn of this century: the novel "The Blood Artists" (1998) by American novelist and screenwriter Chuck Hogan, and "Rifters" trilogy (1999-2005) by Canadian SF author Peter Watts. Both revisit and morph the outbreak narrative, introducing a new type of protagonist - the human-viral hybrid - to reveal the workings of biopower and geontopower as yet another form of structural violence inherent in the late liberalism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".