Rhetorics & Viruses

Author(s): Jaedyn A. Baker, Dominick Beaudine, Frannie Deckas, Rebecca L. Gross,

Steven Mailloux, Nazareth Martínez, Mattie K. Norman and Schuyler Vanderveen
Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric , Vol. 53, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE: IN THE MIDST OF COVID-
19 (2020), pp. 207-216
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/philrhet.53.3.0207

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 Rhetorics & Viruses

Jaedyn A. Baker, Dominick Beaudine,

Frannie Deckas, Rebecca L. Gross,
Steven Mailloux, Nazareth Martínez,
Mattie K. Norman, and Schuyler Vanderveen

a b s t r ac t

During the current COVID-19 pandemic, we are experiencing physical viruses

infecting our bodies, virtual viruses infecting our computers, and symbolic viruses
infecting our thinking. This essay takes up each of these interruptions in a collec-
tive attempt to better understand how we are rhetorically and where we might go
politically from here.

Keywords: COVID-19, pandemics, bodies, digital rhetoric, political rhetoric

On this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us,
so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.
—Albert Camus, The Plague

For better or worse, rhetorical theory likes ambiguities. As Kenneth Burke

puts it, “What we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that
clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise”
(Burke [1950] 1969, viii). Whatever else we are right now, we are embodied
selves in the midst of a plethora of ambiguities, uncertainties, and chal-
lenges due, among other things, to the global coronavirus pandemic and the
ongoing hyperpartisan national politics.
The authors of this essay began the semester physically together in a
class on “Contemporary Rhetorical Theory” subtitled, appropriately enough,

doi: 10.5325/philrhet.53.3.0207
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 53, No. 3, 2020
Copyright © 2020 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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PR 53.3_01_Mailloux etal.indd  Page 207 12/06/20 8:42 PM
 philosophy & rhetoric

“Alien Worlds.” Then we dispersed into our separate enclaves, our different
homes, to self-isolate as our university closed down. Now we are gathered
again virtually, “alone together” as the current saying goes, writing this essay
to address exigencies we are facing as members of a local group, a nation
polity, and a global community. How might rhetorical theory contribute to
the understanding of our current situation, and how might it help us get
through it?
Perhaps we can begin in Burkean fashion by focusing on the ambigui-
ties of the term dominating the cultural conversation at local, national, and
worldwide levels. We are currently experiencing

Physical viruses infecting our bodies

Virtual viruses infecting our computers
Symbolic viruses infecting our thinking

physical viruses and individual bodies—micro level

Today we often experience our bodies intensely in terms of rest/movement
and security/trauma and organize these experiences into narrative form
to make sense of them. If we think of “embodied experience as narrative
and narrative as embodied experience,” we can focus on “narrative rheto-
ric as embodied movement in space over time” (Mailloux 2017, 146, 157).
Some bodily experiences are obviously archived and available for all to see.
Scars, for example, provide immediate evidence of a past trauma. However,
our bodies archive habitual experiences in less obvious ways. Although
­epigenetic archiving of our bodily habits is not available to our immediate
awareness, we can look to our epigenetic code as evidence that our experi-
ence in our bodies is being archived. We similarly make narratives out of
this genetic information.
What’s going to be archived in this moment of pandemic politics?
There certainly won’t be one archive or one story. In this essay, we would
like our readers to consider how contracting the virus, or avoiding the virus,
can be thought of as a range of bodily interruptions. Framing this period
of social interruption in bodily terms, we might ask, how will changes to
our habits become part of our “bodily memory”? In doing this, it’s worth
articulating how “bodily memory” is different from our traditional concep-
tion of memory. This “bodily memory” might be thought of as the ways that
our bodies hold onto—archive—information our minds do not.

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 special issue | in the midst of covid-19

How will the narratives developed from our genetic archives differ
based on political leanings, income inequalities, or racial lines?
While declaring the virus a pandemic has galvanized the international
community into cooperative efforts to combat it, we also risk losing sight
of how smaller, particular populations are at greater risk of inheriting the
traumas it inflicts now. Thinking of the effects of the virus on a global scale
has not helped us keep sight of how it affects certain bodies unequally. For
example, a recent New York Times article found that coronavirus infects
and kills African Americans at a disproportionately higher rate than other
populations in the United States (Eligon et al. 2020). One of the key fac-
tors that may explain the higher mortality rate in the African-American
community is “weathering,” or the cumulative effect of chronic stress and
pain on the immune system. Both chronic stress and pain are the result of
environmental variables, surely, but also may be worsened by their inherited
epigenome.
According to an earlier New York Times article, “The idea is that trauma
can leave a chemical mark on a person’s genes, which then is passed down to
subsequent generations. The mark doesn’t directly damage the gene; there’s
no mutation. Instead it alters the mechanism by which the gene is converted
into functioning proteins, or expressed. The alteration isn’t genetic. It’s epi-
genetic” (Carey 2018). Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that COVID-19
is more severely affecting the African-American community when recent
research has suggested that the long term stressors of American slavery
and Jim Crow have been embedded in the African-American epigenome
(Yehuda and Lehrne 2018; Zimmer 2016). All of these interruptions are
intimate and reinscribe our awareness of this potential for trauma, causing
biological changes to occur over time.
We, in the humanities, must cooperate with those in STEM and
explore the ways in which we can further understand how the effects of
COVID-19 will continue to live on in future generations. How might pan-
demic politics’ bodily rhetoric of interruption affect certain populations
more severely than others? How will the “bodily memory” of marginalized
groups be recorded and viewed over time? The time to set up the long-term
studies that will answer these questions is right now. Epigenetic studies can
help us understand precisely how COVID-19 might live on in our genes
(Aroke et al. 2019).
As rhetoricians, we should listen to the scientists identifying these
­epigenetic changes to form narratives about the pandemic. The narratives

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 philosophy & rhetoric

we create organize our response to the COVID-19 crisis, and the single
narrative that has been told up to this point has been a hegemonic one,
which ignores structural and epigenetic inequalities that have been in
place since American slavery. The virus has not created these structural
­inequalities; it has only made them apparent. Our assumption that rates of
infection are equal among all humans is a symbol of our hope for equality,
but also our propensity to ignore inconvenient realities.
Our intention, in changing the way we study and respond to the virus
in terms of particular bodies, is not to slow a swift response to the cri-
sis. Rather, now that we’ve begun responding, we want to ensure that the
narratives created organize our responses to already-existing structural
inequalities. In doing so, we concretely serve the hope that we can create an
epigenetic continuum that benefits every-body and not just certain bodies.

virtual viruses and prosthetic/digital bodies

To understand what we are in the midst of, we must consider all kinds of
affected bodies, virtual as well as physical. This section examines the conse-
quences of the coronavirus on the digital sphere. COVID-19 has, indisput-
ably, prompted an increase in attention paid to the material body. The body,
understood in its corporeal sense, has become a preoccupation for those
who recognize the observable and experiential physical threats posed by
the illness. This fixation on material bodies is an expected and necessary
response to the dangers promised by both the coronavirus itself and the
economic side effects of our efforts to contain it. We must not overlook,
however, the ways in which the virality of the illness has been matched by
equally catching trends in cyber-spatial communication. Pandemic poli-
tics have impacted the human body beyond the physical illness, coming to
infect our larger, societal body as we turn to technology to work through
the interruptions created by the pandemic.
At the same time that we are experiencing shifts in our understand-
ing of what it means to exercise bodily autonomy and control in a world
shaken by these sudden, infinite interruptions to our individual being, we
are also testing new ways of being together, ways that are free from the
pathological risks associated with physical contact but that are governed by
diverse modes, conventions, tropes, and patterns that are dissimilar to those
utilized in face-to-face interaction. Consequently, our COVID moment
challenges us as a discipline to conceptualize the body in more flexible
and nuanced ways. Our present crisis calls for a consideration of the body

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 special issue | in the midst of covid-19

in its hybridized form, the bionic self: an inevitable but mass accelerated
evolution of the physical body, a spawn of social distancing practices, and
an assemblage of the human and the nonhuman that is situated in the
­intersection between the digital and the physical. We can conceive of the
“digital body” in two primary ways: (1) the figurative: a body of knowledge
on the coronavirus is being produced, circulated, and monitored by indi-
vidual and collective agents in the digital sphere; and (2) the prosthetic: we
are inhabiting and relying on our digital selves in unprecedented ways to
connect and make sense of the world.
Much like how viral cells replicate and attack portions of a host body,
COVID-19 has dominated conversations occurring in the digital landscape.
Social media house information about what occurs in the world, and vari-
ous websites offer information packaged for their targeted communities.
For example, entertainment media mogul Billboard has published articles
pertaining to the virus’s impact on the music industry (Billboard 2020),
while Vice has offered varied responses from noninfected people during
the pandemic (Vice 2020). All these online media outlets are proliferat-
ing divergent perspectives on the current situation. Which of these narra-
tives will be archived in our collective internet history? What bearing will
this internet history have on our memory as a species, and what part of it
will be most potent in shaping our human future? These are questions that
COVID posits but might be answerable only in retrospect.
Recent research shows that technology has become a part of us. We
are in the midst of “‘a profound externalization of media and [its] satu-
ration of everyday life, a growing dispersion of human “agency” through
technologies, and new theories and practices of spatiality’ [that] blur simple
divisions between minds, bodies, technologies, and environments” (Boyle,
Brown, and Ceraso 2018, 254, quoting Rickert 2013, xiii). Like the cyborg,
we rely on devices, inorganic tools, to create and maintain our digital selves.
With these digital bodies, we design new narratives and create what are
both extensions of and alternatives to our real, physical selves, capable of
developing new rhetorics. These digital selves function in the digital-social
spaces of the social network; platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,
Reddit, Pinterest, and many, many more house digital bodies and enormous
digital bodies of knowledge.
Our activities on these platforms do not stop at the digital; they have
real-world ramifications. Interactions happening across digital space exac-
erbate the symptoms of the pandemic at the same time that they attempt
to alleviate them. While utilizing these technologies to stay connected

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 philosophy & rhetoric

may temporarily satisfy our human need for social contact, this reliance on
technology can also be alienating. We must consider what might be lost,
rhetorically speaking, in our online-mediated communications with one
another. Meanwhile, celebrity-unity rhetoric, deployed through social
media posts aimed at making the famous appear consubstantial with the
general populace, often ends up heightening class tension as critics take to
Twitter to point out celebrity privilege. Online attempts at creating cama-
raderie have the power to create feelings of further isolation among those
with limited access to health care, heightening our awareness of the exis-
tence of marginalized bodies in the material world. Similarly, companies
inundate our inboxes with emails outlining their responses to the crisis,
promising discounts or promotional codes in order to keep business run-
ning or offering sentimental slogans to pacify the consumer. These emails
hail us as subjects whose concerns and interests revolve around COVID-19.
Though we may not be physically infected, the virus is living, metaphori-
cally, in our minds through its persistent presence online and its constant
link to our consumer and social identities.
It is COVID’s ushering in of this digital body, along with the digital
body’s response to COVID, that will provide the richest avenues for rhe-
torical and philosophical exploration in the years following this pandemic.

symbolic viruses and political bodies—macro level

When making meaning of the current pandemic, many have turned to
Camus’s The Plague (Botton 2020; Metcalf 2020; Jones 2020). It has flown
off the virtual shelves. The book is ranked number one in French literature
on Amazon, but how ironic and even absurd it is to imagine all the cop-
ies of The Plague sitting idly, collecting dust, on the shelves of dark, closed
bookstores.
The book has played an importantly conciliatory role in making sense
of the current pandemic, and perhaps what it can continue to do is inspire
hope in the face of global crisis. For The Plague is the ultimate symbolic viral
infection of the mind. Similar to how bodies are liable to be infected, minds
have the propensity to become plagued by a certain symbolic sickness.
Dually enmeshed, the body and mind fall ill in communion. We are using
Camus’s sensemaking to, in turn, make sense of our own current situation.
The COVID-19 pandemic poses an interruptive threat to human-
kind—one perhaps comparable only to the oft-weaponized threat of
nuclear war or to previous pandemics in history. The bodily threat of the

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 special issue | in the midst of covid-19

virus is palpable, as are its widespread impacts on our population. While the
first section of this essay reminds us that we are not all equally impacted
due to our differing conditions, COVID-19 has also exposed an internal
inadequacy within all humans: the inherent fragility of life that, when con-
fronted, sparks feelings of meaninglessness.
Our fear regarding the inevitability of death—Camus’s underlying
condition—rears its head and forces us to think en masse. A worldwide
sickness of the mind plagues humanity as we are all, in supposedly equal
measure, forced to recognize human vulnerabilities that have uneven con-
sequences based on race and class. It is an important rhetorical strategy to
use narratives like The Plague to understand our current interruption and
hopefully counteract some of the systemic inequalities it has exposed.
Human internal inadequacies are our mutual enemy in our pandemic
politics, as they are Dr. Rieux’s. The inescapable reality of COVID-19 should
provide common ground—a rare moment of worldwide identification. Yet
what we are seeing in its wake is far from a “rhetoric of unity.” Despite
identifying with one another—being “consubstantial”—“individual [loci]
of motives” are exposed through people’s actions in the larger body politic
(Burke [1950] 1969, 21). Under the guise of commonality, COVID-19 has
ironically solidified our separation.
COVID-19 is virulently displaying systemic inequalities within our
larger body politic, as self-interested groups fearfully project their human
vulnerabilities onto others in the form of partisan or xenophobic rheto-
ric. COVID-19 has been given faces: people who function as scapegoats
upon which we can place our intimate fears of vacuity. The “enemy” that
resides within us—our own mortality—has undergone a rhetorical transi-
tion. It moved from within us to outside of us, through our scene, and onto
someone different. In many cases, this is partisan, with Democrats blaming
Republicans for not taking the virus seriously and Republicans blaming
Democrats for promoting widespread panic that infringes on personal lib-
erties (Badger and Quealy 2020; Abcarian 2020). In other cases, this strat-
egy is turned toward marginalized bodies: “Chinese virus” has been used
to dehumanize and castigate Asian people throughout the world (Rogers,
Jakes, and Swanson 2020).
COVID-19 has infected our thinking, exposing the interpretive
­tendencies that reside within us and furnish a world of structural inequali-
ties. Rather than recognizing it in ourselves, we personify our enemy in
accordance with our innate prejudices: we project our fears on an “Other”
as potential carriers. If we learn anything from The Plague, it is that the only

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 philosophy & rhetoric

true “Other” is not human. Using The Plague to make sense of pandemic
politics is a counteractive rhetorical strategy that allows us to accept the
virus without a face. Assigning it one is to deny what little commonality
we all have: mortality. Unlike their human hosts, viruses do not discriminate.
At its core, what Camus’s writing begets is not desolation and vacuous
meaninglessness but rather freedom to make meaning where one sees fit.
Now, this can be a dangerous game, as is evident in the aforementioned
hyperpolarized rhetoric, but if what Dr. Rieux says about the plague,
“The only means of fighting a plague is—common decency,” is taken into
thoughtful consideration, it becomes clear that Camus is promoting not
the making of just any meaning but, in fact, the making of decent meaning.
Common decency does not collapse into a “rhetoric of unity.” It does not
disguise the prejudice that runs rampant in our world and is laid bare in our
current moment. We must use this moment to recognize our inequalities
and our privileges to take a step toward changing our polarized status quo.
Symbol-using creatures in a symbolic world are necessarily going to make
meaning, and it is crucial that the hermeneutic employed be decent.
Ultimately it is hope that springs forth in The Plague. Not naïve idealism
that disregards our vastly different realities, but a hope for recognition, a
recognition that we must act together with common decency to survive any
collective crisis, whether the global virus pandemic or its concurrent hyper-
partisan politics. But such hopeful recognition must extend beyond the
pandemic itself and embody a commitment not simply to restore the old
socioeconomic order but rather to work toward establishing a new order,
one that addresses our nation’s ingrained inequalities, especially those based
on race and class differences. Hopefully, the pandemic’s radical interruption
of our lives will lead us toward establishing a more long-lasting interrup-
tion of the material inequalities the pandemic has made so visible.

conclusion
Viruses do not replicate through cell division but instead infiltrate their
host and manipulate the host cell to replicate themselves. This creates a
homogenous population of genetically identical copies of the original virus.
However, while so much of our attention is placed on COVID-19, we must
remember that humans are not viruses. Humans are a mess of different
practices, beliefs, and desires that are thrust into being and struggle to make
meaning from what we are around. Despite this variety, we ­consistently
stumble forward, relying on each other and our differences to pick us up

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 special issue | in the midst of covid-19

where we might fail. This essay is the embodiment of that struggle. We must
remind ourselves not to mistake unity for homogeneity. While our inter-
pretations, attitudes, and daily experiences differ, we faced the c­ hallenge of
presenting a unified whole that showcases the way viruses have infected us
in three specific ways: physical, virtual, and symbolic. Amid the interrup-
tions brought forth by ever-expanding difficulties of pandemic politics, we
retain our differences no matter how small or large and continue to push
forward together.

Department of English
Loyola Marymount University

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