Embodiment

“Philosopher Thomas Nagel argued in his well-known essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ that it would be impossible "to know what it is exactly like for a bat to be a bat.", however I believe an effort to imagine what it is like to be a bat by taking "the bat's point of view" will lead to a broad alliance of the alienated, in this case between me and a bat. In order to become a bat, I’ll have to manipulate some of my physiological conditions and ecological habits including roosting habits, reproductive cycle, migration, and hibernation. And more importantly, in the context of COVID-19 pandemic, I’ll have to increase the capacity of my body to be able to host more viruses in my body without severely damaging myself. A bat has an outstanding capability in this, and that’s why they can function as a great reservoir of viruses that are deadly to the other mammals. One of the reasons for this is their ability to limit inflammatory responses. Instead of having an immediate response that sometimes damages one’s own body to eradicate the virus, bats choose to dampen inflammation and live with the viruses. This is certainly one of the qualities that I have to obtain in order to become a bat. In other words, I should be able to offer viruses a few of my ribosomes so that they can produce protein, some enzymes such as RNA polymerase if they want, a part of my ER membrane they can envelop themselves in, Golgi vesicles in case they want to be transported out. If they pirate those from me, we call it “a case of coronavirus infection”, but if I provide it for them without dramatic hostilities such as immune responses, we could frame it differently.”*

💧Fernand Deligny
💧LARP
💧Subjectivity
💧Diagramming Together

* Noam Youngrak Son, "Becoming a Bat. Embodying COVID-19: SF Ways of Fighting Helplessness Confronting the Pandemic," Future Based, https://futurebased.org/topics/becoming-a-bat/.