Becoming the virus: responsibility and cosmopolitan labor in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission

Abstract

This article considers Hari Kunzru’s 2005 novel, Transmission, and its critique of the attributes and assumptions of globalized neoliberal culture, such as an unequivocally positive view of the value of global mobility, and increased diversity of global job opportunities. Through the metaphorical use of a computer virus, Kunzru complicates widespread representations of “privileged” cosmopolitan subjects as divorced from material place and preoccupied with consumerist pleasures, and imagines a new model for global interconnectedness. I argue that, through this criticism and metaphor, Kunzru posits the need for, and the beginnings of citizenship practices centered around, what might be termed a viral cosmopolitanism, that constantly evolves as it moves throughout the world, becoming more heterogeneous, rather than homogenous, through its various points of global contact.

Keywords:

• cosmopolitanism
• viruses
• Hari Kunzru
• Transmission
• Multiculturalism
• globalization

Notes

1. The anti-Semitic euphemism “rootless cosmopolitan” – used by Stalin and others – might be the most notorious example of this.

2. Guy and his various endeavors might also be read as a critique of the increased privileging of the virtual over the material.

3. For further discussions and critiques of this rhetoric of the European border, see Balibar (2004), Bauman (1998) and Mezzadra (2004).

4. Ghassan Hage (2000, 201) argues that the cosmopolitan individual is marked by whether she or he is “capable of appreciating and consuming ‘high-quality’ commodities and cultures, including ‘ethnic’ culture”, suggesting the centrality of an indefinable “taste” to cosmopolitan identities.

5. Despite the novel’s formal imbrication of the two narratives, the two characters never interact – apart from the brief suggestion that Guy flies overhead of a walking Arjun, a moment that is very much a stretch to consider interaction. The form of the novel, thus, invites readers to participate in the ethical cosmopolitanism the novel theorizes.

6. Berthold Schoene (2009, 148) argues that Arjun “dreams of becoming a US citizen”, that “nowhere else than US America [ ..s] will do” – a dream personified by Sunny. Yet, while Sunny’s wealth is explicitly connected to the US, it might be more accurate to consider his performance of wealth in a more global context of neoliberal capitalism. Guy’s sense of self, for instance, is very similar to Sunny’s – which would suggest that this particular persona is not specifically referential of one particular nation state.

7. Richard Brock (2008, 379), for instance, points to another potential reading of the virus, suggesting that the Leela virus allegorically points to the global HIV/AIDS pandemic – a reading also made by James Merikangas (2005). Brock’s reading of the virus points to the overlap between images of the immigrant (legal or not) and disease (386).