Andrés G. Seguel Seminary: and anthropological view of 2009 H1N1 pandemics

As we announced in our webpage, this week took place the seminary by one of our recurrent Andrés G. Seguel, recently came from Chile. In this ocassion, Andrés has tell us some ideas about his current work and thinkings: influenza, subjectivity, and the emergence of singularities. 

colleagues,

Here our report:

Andres beguns with our famous reading about the work of Deleuze by Foucault (you can read more about it here and here) about the relationship between knowledge and power (and also subjectivity). He came this theories to the symbol/sign relationship, and also wanted to split the substrate from the object (ANT and Foucault never achieved this). How he does that? With the "fold" concept: in a fold, we have captures that allows that some particular object enacts as it is (and not as anyother is), but this enactment is never definitive, but temporal and made from a joint of points.

A singularity is a "indent" in that fold. But, how emerges this singularity? between the relationship and the tension between the different points. The "logoi" concepts allows us to explain it: a logoi is a place where a logic is represented by his tension. When this tension is stabilized, we find a temporal object.

This is related with the subjectivity explained by Deleuze and Guattari in the book "La Subjetivación", but this two authors propose something quite different about subjectivity:

Deleuze: It offers a fold, more large in time, less autonomous, and less changing (more procesual).

Guattari: It offers not a fold, but a "indent", and this indent is faster, more autonomous and more changing and emergent.

In the H1N1 case, technology acts as a key element to the emergence of a singularity: pandemics. It was a very important controversy in 2009, but why?

In 2009, WHO changed the classical definition of a pandemics (two outbreaks in two isolated places one from the another) to the emergence of a new influenza virus against human population has not immunization (we recommend to read the book "Pandemics Perhaps" by Carlo Caduff).

About the relation between information and how works CDC/ECDC and physicias that must alert about suspected cases of flu, this two elements are articulated from:

-Platforms like HealthMap.

-Panoramas (Latour concept).

-Medical platforms where they can predict the number of case of a particular strain of flu.

-Medical protocols.

-Google Flu Trends.

All of this elements makes H1N1 visible, and this is so important to Foucault when he is explained by Deleuze (go to the post linked at the biginning of this post). 

Visibility, then, allows to emerge a particular subjectivity, and this, at the same time, has some concrete afects.

Photo Credit: Jose Ramon Pato