Is anyone wondering how I decided on the name “VirusHead” (and domain virushead.net)?

It’s a variation on theoryhead. “Theoryheads” immerse themselves in the study of theory – media and popular culture studies, postmodern philosophy, literary theory, and so on. The first time I heard the word was in the 80’s. This was in the context of postmodern philosophy generally, and especially through the lenses of Derrida and Foucault. In the humanities, one extreme was captured by the idea of the “theoryhead,” who then defined their others as reactionary dinosaurs (in the usual way of things).

I’ll admit it. I’m a bit of a theoryhead. Theory doesn’t scare me, although at times it seems unneccessarily opaque. I don’t get anxious about it the way some people seemed to do. Also, I don’t conflate all the aspects together. To me, the points made by each participant are strikingly different and don’t really belong to the same “movement” (unlike “dittoheads” and “Rush puppets”). Some of the reaction to theory was silly – as if the “canon” (cannon!) hadn’t always been under contestation in some way or another, as though different works didn’t speak differently or with different intensities at different times and places – and to different people.

Theoryheads tended to put themselves under an obligation to become more conscious about their ideologies and assumptions about cultural narratives and productions of various kinds, letting go a bit on the idea that we could stand in a God-position to proclaim truth with a capital T – we were more aware that our understandings arise from where we are. Reference became intertextuality, reflection became reflexivity. It was fun. After reading Aquinas and Tillich and Gadamer, it was wonderful to read Burroughs and Baudrillard and Borges (my three B’s). Hermeneutics and deconstruction went together like Catholicism and Buddhism – very complementary.

I enjoyed reading – listening – paying attention for strong interpretations of a text, but also listening for the silences, for what was missing, what was unsaid and assumed and left out. Ideas could be constructed around and dependent upon an absence. Simply ask – “what is missing here? who doesn’t get to speak on this? what situation or concept is being left out? who benefits from its being left out?” and so on. Of course, what we underestimated at the time was the extent to which any narrative could be “deconstructed” – or at least played upon. Motives for doing so sometimes have little to do with justice, liberation and freedom. It’s like science or a tool – it’s all a matter of how it is used. At the moment, I think the right wing feels more comfortable with outright language games, rhetoric as blunt hammer. As a culture, we didn’t seem to be able to become more sophisticated in our interpretive abilities.

We were all second-wavers in graduate school. Derrida was old news before we even understood a thing he was saying. Poststructuralism courses were taught in graduate school without any background in what structuralism was (how postmodern). Then, theory was “out”, before we had absorbed enough of it. Too scary for some, I guess. In all fairness, some theoryheads are off-putting in various ways – just like the Punks and the Surrealists and the New Critics and the cultures of hip hop, disco dancing, and the fox trot. It’s all a matter of perspective and location. I remember when I didn’t believe in natural selection – things change when you keep asking questions.

It seems that what comes after postmodernism might just be something like barbarism again. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault puts forward two images to illustrate the difference between two kinds of power regimes – spectacle and surveillance. One describes a man publically tortured (flesh torn off, burnt with sulfer, molten lead, boiling oil and resin..), which demonstrates the sovereign’s personal power to inflict pain upon transgressors, eliminating them except for their example that reinscribes his power. The other is a man, invisible to the public but under constant surveillance in a prison – a panopticon. This second regime is constructed upon the production of conditioned “docile bodies.” It’s a science of control and discipline depending on control of activity, repetition, hierarchies of levels looking up for direction, and normalizing judgments – all self-reinforcing and localized institutions. The King isn’t necessary – there are moles and eyes and technologies of control (including language) at every point and level. More images: Abu Graib, Fallujah, New Orleans. What regime is this – a new combination?

We missed something important there – with all our talk about power and class and gender and sexuality and race and desire and identity, it didn’t really take hold. It didn’t get deterritorialized, rewritten, picked up and used by the general public (except in parody, and that taken literally). Misunderstanding on all sides. What should have increased our toleration of ambiguity and taught us how to ask better questions too often fell apart under triviality and territorial careerism.

So, um, that was a long aside…. to get back to VirusHead:

Theoryhead was an unstable signifier, with both positive and negative connotations – much like the virus I was studying. I was writing a discourse analysis of contemporary fiction about how viruses are imagined and constructed, and what that said about Americans in the latter half of the 20th century. I was a “theoryhead” for sure but, more than that, I was a “VirusHead.” The textual materials themselves crisscrossed and divided, moving and seeking, like my ideas, like a virus. I was reflexively and multiply and intertextually and bio-machinically (yes, I know that’s not a word) infected, a one-woman epidemic of mutational interpretation following the trail of likewise. Biological viruses, computer viruses, memes, nanotech – they all shared similaries that went beyond simple definition. I immersed myself in the flows and ambiguities. Sometimes it was incredibly interesting, sometimes it made me anxious in ways that theory never did.

I’ve had an online site of one sort or another since 1996. When I finally got my own domain, I named it VirusHead. It led to some misunderstandings (of which the less said, the better).

There is actually another VirusHead, which is why I’m at .net and not .com. It’s a very cool site, go visit.