In the Times of Viruses

Abstract

In the past few years, scientists have discovered ancient viruses trapped in ice that some fear may cause our next global pandemic. The existence of frozen viruses engenders multiple types of relations to the pastness of the virus, including past lives, ecologies, diseases, and ancestors. However, the current great thaw also renders frozen viruses a concern of the future, whereby viruses create relations to future promises of viral pandemics in addition to potential vaccines. That viruses are frozen in glaciers and permafrost complicates our relationship to viruses and time: the ancientness of frozen viruses compares to the possibility of its return to new ecological conditions. By surveying recent scientific and media accounts of these frozen viruses, I propose that frozen ancient viruses are an allochronic assemblage of potentiality that are both fearful and promising, speaking to growing STS attention to microbes, cryopolitics, and the divisions between living, nonliving, and dead.