Contagion: With-Touch, With-Touchless

words by Michael Marder

With the new coronavirus pandemic, the sense of touch has come under attack. Throughout the past two years, medical authorities have repeatedly told us not to touch our faces, not to touch doorknobs with our hands, and definitely not to touch others (no kisses on the cheek, handshakes, or other bodily greetings). It is easy to understand the reason behind such guidance. The virus is highly contagious and can survive not only on the skin but also on inorganic surfaces for a relatively long period of time. But the cultural frame of what is going on is at least as important as the biological or epidemiological explanation.

The acceleration of processes that went under a broad heading of globalization involved a growing virtualization of the world. To become a globe (which is, itself, a geometrical abstraction, rather than concrete reality), the world had to be reimagined as an ideal unity. Cultural homogenization, often opposed and criticized for impoverishing and razing local customs and ways of life, was but a side-effect of that idealizing movement.

A lion’s share of the work of virtualization was accomplished by the Internet, along with a whole slew of technologies for obviating or digitalizing touch: voice-controlled devices, touch-less water taps, soap dispensers and flushes, not to mention contactless payment methods. Touch became obsessively linked to the touch screens of smart phones and tablets that, as we have now learnt, could be perfect sites for spreading the coronavirus infection.

It was a dream of globalization to create touch-less reality, a virtual togetherness without bodily involvement. Tourists and politicians, UN workers and expatriate professionals, business consultants and (yes!) academics could move throughout the globe as though they were disembodied spirits, present in the flesh as if they were not really present, not really exposed to sudden dangers and contingencies.

In the age of the coronavirus, that dream has been shattered. It turns out that our means of transport carry more than their human passengers and that locations, which could be just about anywhere, like airports or big hotel chains, also host other forms of life or nonlife — viruses. This uninvited and invisible excess reminds us of the fact that, far from disembodied spirits, we exist thanks to our fragile bodies that may, in a matter of days, find themselves on the verge of serious illness or death.

The COVID-19 pandemic signals a return of what has been suppressed or repressed by the entwined drives to globalize and virtualize the world, namely the body. And the body as a whole is represented by the sense of touch, its corresponding organ being not the hand, as we automatically assume, but skin. Just as jetlag testifies to discrepancies between our technological and physiological possibilities, so the current pandemic highlights the incongruities between the dream of virtualization-globalization, on the one hand, and living “in one’s skin,” rather than purely “in one’s head,” on the other.

Here, a seemingly negligible difference between infection and contagion comes to the fore. Infection literally means being tainted within, receiving something impure inside oneself. Contagion, as a Latinate rendition of “with-touch” or “touching-with,” entails not the infiltration of a foreign and potentially damaging substance into an organism, but communicability, the ability of pathological agents to jump from host to host. Like the touch it names, contagion happens on the surface, at the interface of surfaces in contact with one another. It leaves the fiction of contamination-as-infiltration behind and, instead of fixating on the distinction between the inside and the outside (as well as on the boundaries, borders or membranes separating the two), focuses on the territory of contact, the space in-between that makes every body but a transit station for viral self-replication.

The other peculiarity of contagion is that it disrespects divisions between areas we typically treat as totally independent: biology and economics, psychology and informatics. Viruses replicate themselves in living tissues and computer programs, through memes that “go viral” or through the DNA or RNA encoding of proteins, by which they act. Contagion spreads among members of a population, from one species to another (as in the case of coronavirus), in financial markets, through rumors and fear, in the dissemination of ideologies, even as it produces feedback loops between these different areas.

Why do contagions have a significantly broader range and reach than infections? Is it not because contagion requires no more than the brushing of surfaces: of skin and skin, skin and a doorknob, fear-laced gossip and an ear receptive to it, an insolvent bank and similar institutions that lose investor confidence, financial markets and direct economies, “America First” and another nationalist “Me first”? Contagion, then, is all about touch, not incorporation — a factor that lends it its speed and the capacity to spread far and wide.

To return to the coronavirus pandemic: although the dynamics of touch call us back to our bodies, they do so under the sign of more severe repression still. If, before the current crisis, we simply forgot the body, failing to notice it as it seamlessly moved through and interacted with other bodies and surfaces of a globalized world, now we recall (indeed, are recalled to) its existence in an atmosphere of conscious negation, distilled in the injunction “do not touch” — not even yourself. (Does this injunction not parody the words Jesus addresses, according to John 20:17, to Mary Magdalene who recognizes him after his resurrection: Noli me tangere, “touch me not”?)

Strangely enough, the moment masses of people around the world are faced with the fragility of their bodies and lives—the moment we are called back to our corporeal existence—we must take measures to reduce direct contact with others, to retreat to the private cocoons of our homes. No sooner does the flesh-and-blood body make its comeback on a global scale than the virtualization of existence intensifies, with social life passing almost entirely to the Internet. In a pandemic, the dynamics of touch retrieve the body both as dramatically threatened and as a source of threat, reinstating the strictest version of its virtualization.

A period of respite from the fast-paced routine of our lives afforded to many by the COVID-19 pandemic should be an occasion for reflecting on what was going on before this viral outbreak and what the world, our relations to each other and to our own bodies might look like after it subsides. How does the virus intervene into the history of touch, shaped by social conventions, political and medical regimes, technological inventions? What are the senses of contagion spanning the increasingly “touch-less” virtual reality and its suppressed actual underside? How to live and to think on the surface, with the overlapping (potentially contagious) surfaces we have mistaken for discrete things: bodies, economies, information systems and systems of beliefs?

接觸傳染：伴隨碰觸、無碰觸

文｜Michael Marder

自新冠疫情以來，觸覺的感知受到侵凌。過去兩年間，醫療權威們不斷地告訴我們不要觸碰自己的臉、不要用雙手觸碰門把，當然，也不能觸摸他人（包括親吻臉頰、握手或其他肢體問候），而確實也不難理解這些規章背後的原因。病毒傳染機率高，並且能同時在皮膚和無機物的表面生存。不過，我們應意識到當今正在架構的文化體系與生物學、傳染病學將會是同等地重要。

凌駕在全球化斗大議題之下的加速進程，其實涉及且包含了虛擬化世界的成長。「全球」二字意味著（其本身即是一種抽象幾何的概念，而不是具體的現實）世界必須被重新地想像成一個理想的整體。而全球化造成的文化同質化現象飽受批評，因其時常使地方風俗與生活方式變為貧脊，但是這些都被視為僅不過是理想運動的副作用罷了。大部分虛擬化的工作皆是在網路中進行，同時廣泛地運用一系列移除或數位化「觸摸」的技術，如：聲控設備、感應式水龍頭、自動給皂機、自動沖水器，以及現今多樣的感應式支付系統。觸摸顯然地與智慧型手機與平板電腦的觸控面板緊密相連，然而正如我們現在所知，它們可能就是傳播及感染新冠病毒的完美場所。

過往，創造一個沒有身體參與的虛擬歸屬感，也就是發展零接觸（touch-less）的現實，曾是全球化的理想。 不論是遊客和政治人物、聯合國工作人員和外籍專業人士、商業顧問和（沒錯！）學者，皆能在全球的範圍內自由移動。這就好似以肉身在世存有的他們，靈魂脫離了肉身，彷彿他們不是真實的存在，而這也同時讓他們不會真正地暴露在突發的危險事件中。

然而，這樣的夢想在疫情時代中被粉碎了。事實證明，我們所認為的「交通工具」所及之處，遠比其運輸的乘客、其所到地點更多。而這些地點幾乎是在任何可能的地方，像是無生命的病毒、其他形式的生命存在於機場或大型連鎖飯店裡，這樣無形、不請自來的「過剩」存在提醒我們一個事實：我們遠非那脫離肉體的精神，我們的存在更有賴於那脆弱的身體——那個或許在幾天之內，就有可能發現正在遭受嚴重疾病或面臨死亡邊緣的脆弱身體。

新冠肺炎疫情的大流行象徵著長久以來在世界全球化和虛擬化的交纏中被壓制、被束縛的「身體」的再次回歸。身體作為一個觸覺再現的整體，其對應的器官並不是我們所假設的手，而是皮膚。正如時差證明了我們在科技與生理之間的差異，當前的疫情也凸顯了虛擬-全球化的夢想，更彰顯了純粹地「活在自身腦袋中」與「活在自身皮囊中」之間的不協調。

在這裡，感染（ infection）和接觸傳染（contagion）之間看似微不足道的區別就被凸顯出來了。感染在字面上有被污染、接收不純潔事物的意思；而接觸傳染（contagion）在拉丁文中則被詮釋為「與⋯⋯接觸」的意思，其所指並非外來的、可能具有破壞性的物質滲入有機體，其重點是在於傳染性，也就是於病原體在宿主之間跳躍的能力。正如同「觸摸」這個字面上的意思一樣，傳染是發生在表面，或說是發生在一個相互接觸的表面上，而不是著重於內、外部之間（以及區分兩者之界限、邊界或薄膜）的差異；另一方面，「觸摸」的意涵將「污染即是滲透」的虛構拋在腦後，轉而關注接觸的領域和介於接觸對象兩者之間的空間——這個空間便是使得每個身體皆成為病毒自我複製的中繼站。

接觸傳染（contagion）的另一個特點在於它僭越了通常被我們視為絕對獨立的領域之間的區別，包括​生物學和經濟學、心理學和情報學。藉由迷因式的「病毒傳播」或是透過對病毒能起作用的蛋白質DNA或RNA序列，使病毒得以在活體組織和電腦程式中複製自身。接觸傳染可以是在人群之間散播、從一個物種到另一個物種（好比冠狀病毒）、或甚至在金融市場之中，同時也有可能是透過謠言、恐懼或意識形態傳播；然而，即使是在不同領域之間接觸，它依然能產生傳染的回饋循環（feedback loops）。

為何接觸傳染（contagion）的範圍遠比感染（ infection）之所及還要廣大呢？這正是因為接觸傳染只需要輕輕地觸碰表面：皮膚和皮膚、皮膚和門把、恐懼的八卦和接收的耳朵、資不抵債的銀行和失去投資者信心的相似機構、金融市場和直接經濟、「美國優先」主義和其他民族主義的「我族優先」嗎？由此可知，接觸傳染可以說就是接觸，而不是結合，這也就是為何「傳染」的速度和傳播能力能夠如此廣泛的主因。

回到關於新冠肺炎疫情的議題，儘管觸碰的動態將我們喚回自身身體，但這仍是奠基在更為嚴厲的壓制中而發生的。如果在這場疫情危機之前，我們僅是因為身體能完美地在全球化的世界中穿越並且與其他身體、其他表面互動，因此而忘記了自己的身體的存在。現在，我們回憶起來（實際上，其實是被回憶），身體的存在是在意識的否定性氛圍中被建立、在「禁止觸摸」的禁令中被提煉出來的，而這樣的身體，甚至不存在在我們自身之中。（根據約翰福音第20章第17節，這個禁令難道不是在模仿耶穌復活後，對認出他的抹大拉的瑪麗亞所說的話：「不要觸碰我（Noli me tangere」嗎？）

奇怪的是，這一刻足以使世界上大多數人面對身體與生命的脆弱——這一刻也同時喚回我們對肉身存在的意識，而我們必須採取適當措施以減少與他人的直接接觸，甚至還必須退回到各自像是繭那般的家之中。有血有肉的身體才剛以席捲全球之姿捲土重來，存在的虛擬化卻也隨之加劇，並伴隨著社交生活從現實完全轉移至網路的現象。在新冠疫情日子裡，觸碰的動態讓身體被視為嚴重的威脅及威脅的來源，同時使最嚴峻的身體虛擬化重返這個世界。

COVID-19疫情大流行，其實為許多人提供在步調快速的日常生活中的喘息時間；同時亦可說是疫情提供了一個機會使我們反思病毒爆發之前的世界，以及在疫情逐漸趨緩後，我們彼此之間、我們與身體之間的關係又是如何。病毒是如何介入由社會習俗、政治、醫療制度及科技發明形塑而成之「觸摸的歷史」呢？在愈來愈多的「非接觸式」的虛擬實境及被其壓制的現實之下，所產生的接觸傳染的感受又是什麼呢？以及該如何在那些重疊的（具有潛在傳染性的）、已被我們誤認為是獨立的事物表面：身體、經濟、資訊系統和價值體系中，生活和思考呢？