Yet this new form of virulence is ambiguous, and AIDS is…

““Yet this new form of virulence is ambiguous, and AIDS is an example of it. AIDS provides an argument for a new sexual prohibition, but it is no longer a moral prohibition: it is a functional prohibition on the circulation of sex. This breaks all the commandments of modernity . Sex, like money , like information , must circulate freely. Everything must be fluid, and acceleration is inevitable. To revoke sexuality on the grounds of a viral danger is as absurd as stopping international trade on the grounds that it is fuelling the cancerous rise of th e dollar. No one seriously envisages such a thing. Now , at a stroke with AIDS: a stopping of sex. A contradiction in the system? Perhaps this suspension has some enigmatic purpose, linked contradictorily to the equally enigmatic purpose of sexual liberation? The spontaneous self-regulation of systems is something well-known. We know how they produce accidents of their own , put a brake on their own operation , in order to survive on a basis contrary to their own principles. All societies survive against their own value-systems: they have to have such a system, but they also have to deny it and operate in opposition to it. Now , we live by at least two principles: the principle of sexual liberation and that of communication and information . But it is entirely as though the species were , through the AIDS threat, producing an antidote to its principle of sexual liberation, and, through cancer, which is a disruption of the genetic code and therefore a pathology of information, a resistance to the all-powerful principle of cybernetic control. What if all this signified a rejection of the obligatory flows of sperm, sex, signs and words, a rejection of forced communication , programmed information and sexual promiscuity? What if all this were a vital resistance to the expansion of flows, circuits and networks - admittedly, at the cost of a new lethal pathology, but a pathology which would in the end protect us from something even more serious? With AIDS and cancer, we might be said to be paying the price for our own system: we are exorcising its banal virulence in a fatal form.””

— Jean Baudrillard