But for all of these contentions and difficulties, I hope it will become clear that the figure of the virus and the various network forms that it claims as its natural habitat[8] are also rife with ambiguity, as it is one of the central projects of this study to reconfigure such aporias as virtual potentials[9] - as radical openings and opportunities from which multiple, intersecting vectors of thought can extend. Thus, while it is certainly not my intention to argue that the virus is always already politically progressive (to do so would be an error of the highest order) or even worse to solely play devil's advocate to the virus (although there will, of course, be a small, but necessary amount of such advocacy),[10] I do still believe that there is an immense potential to learn from viral breakdown, propagation, and mutation, as its form is symptomatic of the specific forms that control and resistance can take in an era of networked capitalism. So it is by examining closely the particular ways in which this notoriously slippery, secretive, and "malicious" object operates in and across multiple contexts that I hope to cull parallel knowledge about the ways in which power and resistance can potentially operate in what Gilles Deleuze has called "the society of control."[11]

However, as my list of difficulties may begin to indicate, any study that can even come close to breaching the multi-faceted topic of computer viruses will also need to reformulate its analysis to meet the object of study on its own terms. The consequences of such a statement could be extrapolated into any number of novel arguments and argumentative methodologies concerning the virus, but in the space of this paper, my "viral methodology" (my thinking-viral) will broadly entail taking into account the computer virus as a heterogeneous mixture of epistemic things: both self-reproducing and semi-autonomous computer programs and cultural objects of fear and paranoia, simultaneously. Thus, by focusing on the historically and culturally conditioned ontological and behavioral characteristics of computer viruses, as well as the relationship of such characteristics to more familiar questions of power, control, and ideology, I hope to study the computer virus through what Eva Horn has called "media studies."[12]    

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