Speculative Virontology: Malevolent Infrastructure against the Design of Infrastructural Intimacy in Pulse

Abstract

In this article, speculative virontology refers to a form of thought that revalues the biontological framework present in current queer theoretical and new materialist thinking. Using an archive of horror films, Paul Golding’s Pulse from 1988 in particular, this article points toward malevolent infrastructure – the conceptualization of matter that is performatively terrorizing the closedness of mutually constitutive design of infrastructural intimacy and the immanence of biontology. Both intimacy and immanence depend on production of space and time which exclude forms of life that are not white middle-class cisnormative (re)productive heterosexuality and thus deemed not properly alive and outside of Being. The figure of the Virus upsets these processes of exclusion and divisions, and reorders conceptuality away from immanence and biontology toward what is non-biontological, toward that which is neither Life nor Nonlife.