Toward a democratic theory of contagion: virality and performativity with Eve Sedgwick, JL Austin, Hortense Spillers, and Patricia Williams

Abstract In Euripides’ Bacchae, the 2015 film The Fits, and John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), refusal is depicted as worryingly contagious and efforts are made to contain it. But each represents a different model of contagion. In the Bacchae, refusal breaks out all-at-once; in The Fits, a contagion passes through a community in a sequence, mutating as it travels; in A Theory of Justice, refusal is contagious but isolable. In each of these examples, efforts to contain contagion are made via ‘deformatives’, Eve Sedgwick’s term for Austinian performative utterances that shame or stigmatize gender queerness and are themselves, she says, ‘uniquely contagious’. Might their phobic contagion be reworked into a more philic form for democratic theory? Sedgwick might object since she thinks Austin’s exemplary performative is the ‘I do’ of the straight, marrying couple. But How To Do Things with Words shows Austin turning not just to the couple but also to the crowd, which may be gathered or dispersed by another recurring example—that of a bull in the field. This is the first of three counterexamples offered here of the potentially democratic and viral powers of performativity: Austin’s crowd-drawing and-dispersing bull (isolable, yet uncontainable), Hortense Spillers’ viral constitutionalism which may be made to mutate (the sequence model), and Patricia Williams’s alchemy of rights (the all-at-once model of outbreak). In all three, the power and impotence of law is explored: in the comedy of Austin’s memorandum warning about the bull, in Spiller’s constitutionalism, and in Williams’ new rights. In all three contagion is let loose. Efforts to contain it with law, whether by way of property, romance, or whiteness, are mocked, and new consideration of contagion’s democratic possibilities are invited.