an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, August 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
An Era of Zoē and Bios?
A conversation with Eugene Thacker
Nicholas Ruiz III: Given the extraordinary development of the
biotechnical sciences, have the humanities, theory and philosophy, etc.
adequately considered our burgeoning transformations as forms of life, renewing
or adequately reconsidering ideas such as ‘vitalism’ and so on?
Eugene Thacker: Well yes
and no – sorry, typical answer, right? Yes, I think there is a lot of work in
the humanities and social sciences addressing biotechnical advances at all
levels, from cultural representation to policy analysis. But no, I don’t always
feel that the issues are considered in terms of their full implications. One
problem is that the humanities (and perhaps too the social sciences?) are too
often polarized vis-ŕ-vis the biosciences: either you re-establish the
impermeable boundaries of the humanities and do not engage at all, or you
engage and then follow the advances, always one step behind. One of the greatest
challenges for the humanities is thinking outside of a reactionary model of
theorizing, a problem that faces ethical thinking in particular. If at all
possible, we should avoid simply ‘responding’ or ‘replying’ to a techno-science
that supposedly pre-exists theory. Really, this means rethinking what a
techno-scientific ‘event’ is, and what it means that ‘theory’ (whatever that
is!) then arrives on the scene to respond and interpret the event. I say it’s a
challenge because, from one vantage point, it can look as if there are entire
sub-sections of academia in science studies and media studies that are in
effect produced by biotechnical advances (genetics, biotech, nanotech), and I
myself have felt this numerous times. Cultural theory should not put itself in
the position of always playing ‘catch-up’ with the latest techno-scientific
advances, else all becomes a sort of game about what’s trendy and pitching
memes based on that. Now, there have been several strategies for resisting this
notion of the anteriority of theory – Baudrillard’s ‘fatal strategies,’
postmodern ‘pataphysics, and of course Warholian hyper-irony (which becomes,
well, sincerity). But I also am reminded of Deleuze’s notion of ‘transcendental
empiricism,’ which generally presupposes that there is something not-thought
that always overflows thought, something ‘abstract’ that always exceeds its
concrete manifestations in events, gadgets, institutions, etc. For this reason,
I think that setting up an intersection between ‘theory’ and ‘technics’ (or if
you like, life-theory and bio-technics) can be worthwhile. For me, biotechnical
artifacts like the genome database, the bio-chip, or the DNA computer are not
only interesting because they are particular configurations of
knowledge-production and the generation of an immaterial bio-economy – that’s
definitely important – but these bizarre, teratological artifacts are
interesting to me because of the way they constellate certain ways of thinking
about ‘life itself.’ I don’t think we can separate this ontological question
from the questions of value/economisation and technics/normalization. So the
question is not just how a scientific tool or artifact is symptomatic of the
commodification of life or the normalization of health, but also what were the
affordances in thinking about ‘life itself’ that enabled such an artifact to be
designed and built, and, once built, how do such artifacts revise Spinoza’s
question concerning ethics – what can you do to a body? ‘Vitalism’ is indeed an
important concept here, not only in its historical guise, but as a way of
thinking that posits an essence to life irreducible to its material
instantiation. It seems to me that biological information often plays that role
(which makes the patenting of the DNA of life-forms take on a new meaning…).
NRIII:
Perhaps we reach a point in living where our destiny catches up with us:
a point where our escape velocity doubles up on us. It is at this precise point that we become
creators or destroyers. The paradox here
is that we cannot do one without the other.
As biomedia, what are we creating and destroying?[1]
ET: Hmm, I see what you mean,
especially in certain research fields that deal with biomedia, how the process
of taking a biological sample (hair, skin, blood), then converting it into DNA
sequence data (that is, light pulses), then collating that data into a file,
then uploading that file to a genome database, then downloading that file and
synthesizing the DNA sequence, and then storing the ‘wet’ sequence in a bacterial
plasmid ‘library’ – processes like this involve a certain implosion of creation
and destruction. But, on the other hand – I apologize, it’s because I’m writing
on political theology at the moment – it also seems to me that what we have
with biomedia is a kind of resurrection or a transubstantiation of life, an
essence to life that is indissociable from its ‘form’ as information. And there
is also a morphology to biomedia processes in fields like genomics,
bioinformatics, systems biology, nanomedicine, and so on. On the simplest level
that morphology moves between ontologically distinct types of information –
from ‘wet’ data (the genetic code understood to be in a living cell in a blood
sample) to ‘dry’ data (that code as a computer file in a database) and back
again, and in between there are also ‘damp’ or ‘moist’ data (shards of
single-stranded DNA attached to a silicon chip, nano-scale DNA
microprocessors). We can call this a ‘morphological transubstantiation’ – how’s
that for a keyword? Or, if you want a more tangible example, research into
regenerative medicine and stem cells is basically all about the morphology of
genetic code. Researchers aim to find out what makes a single undifferentiated
cell become a specialized neuron, or muscle cell, or epithelial cell
(post-structuralists would’ve had a field day with this cellular
‘differentiation’). Blood into brain into bone. This is the problem Aristotle
faced in his biological treatises – how to account for the relation between
‘life’ and change, the fact that some thing changes, and that that some thing
is living; Aristotle stopped short of equating ‘life’ with ‘change’ (motion and
alteration), but perhaps complexity theory has picked this up. Some thing, some
essence or source, some ‘cause’ must remain continuous such that change
(including most of all the instrumental change of technę) can take place. From a certain perspective, all of this
takes on a very fantastical tone, involving shape-shifting and
non-anthropomorphic chimeras. Perhaps the genre of supernatural horror is the
place to look for a cultural understanding of such phenomena.
NRIII: To see the world anew; that is the
most difficult. The orgy of rationality
is never over in our day. Is biotechnology
the ‘after-party’ of Enlightenment rationality, the technical usurpation of the
body as a method?
ET: Whoa - well, if biotech is the
after-party of the Enlightenment, then I’d hate to imagine what the hang-over
the next morning will be…But what if biotech is not really about
hyper-rationality, but really about something else – like aesthetics, for
instance? I mean, yes, on a certain level biotech is very obviously the
instrumentalization of life, and one can easily show this, from archaic practices
of animal domestication and breeding to the most high-tech nano-sciences, what
would change would simply be the episteme
and its corresponding mode of valuation (thus there would be a biotech era
corresponding to each stage in capitalist development – an agrarian biotech, an
industrial biotech, a post-industrial or post-Fordist biotech, maybe even a
post-caplitalist biotech). And today, the techophilic emphasis on the
convergence between biotech and infotech, along with the globalized
pharmaceutical industry’s bottom-line mentality, certainly points to this
‘after-party’ feeling. Yes, but I wonder. I think about cloned mammals (the
failures as well as successes), human ears grown on the back of a mouse,
lab-grown organs on specially-designed polymer scaffolds, 3-D data-viz for
genomics, custom-tailored bio-pharmaceuticals, ‘genetic design’, plasmid
libraries, hybridomas – it seems we haven’t really considered the aesthetics of
the biotech industry. It is at once abject and sublime. So you want to see bio
art?, I’ll show you bio art (and it sells, too)!
NRIII: Biofuels, Biomaterials, Biohazards,
Biomedia—BioEra—what is truly at stake in this era of Bios? In the Era of a
global genome, does “globalism’s ‘planetary computerization’” now include bare and
political life?[2] Has the case
for Deific immortality and salvation, and hence socio-ethical futures, given
our religio-ethical pasts, all been transferred to the realm of the
biotechnical? Are we simply speaking in
Darwinian terms, of perhaps, what was already a natural Biopolity all along,
and now simply hyperrealized? BioCapital
clones, tradable within global biopolity?
ET: You’re right in pointing to the prevalence of ‘bio’
words out there, so much so that it seems that ‘bio’ is the new ‘post-’ or
‘cyber-‘ prefix (take a term, add a ‘bio’ prefix to it, and say that it
fundamentally challenges something fundamental – sorry, that ‘s my cynicism
talking). In addition, what people usually mean by adding ‘bio’ is really what
Aristotle means by zoę (bare, animal
life). So we should really be talking not about biopolitics but zoopolitics…But
there is a certain tonality to the ‘bio,’ and I think you hit on it in terms of
the potentially transformative or ‘redemptive’ promises of new technologies.
The greatest achievement of biotechnics would not be the transformation of all
life into machines, but the resurrection of life that is perfected biology,
more biological than the biological itself, the redemption of biology. We have
to ask, what is brought to the foreground when we think about something being
‘bio,’ as when we hear talk of biohazards, biofuels, biomaterials,
biopharmaceuticals, and biodefense? One thing is that a given, relatively
unquestioned notion of ‘life itself’ is regarded as being incorporated into the
technological domain, either for economic profit, for the demands of security,
or the renormalization of health and illness – the last bastion of nature now
laid bare by ever new technologies. I would question this assumption. Let’s
create a genetic clone of Agamben and Stiegler: part of the task of the ‘bio’
is to manage the back-and-forth passages between a ‘life itself’ and the
capacity to co-extensively produce that ‘life itself’ as such. Once something
is referred to as being ‘bio’-whatever – we can call this a ‘whatever life’ – a
dual and contradictory demand is made of it: that it be at once an essence of
‘life itself’ exterior to all pre-existing categories of thought (‘life’ as the
horizon of thought), and, at the same time, that this life exterior to thought
exists in a direct relation to our ability to know it as such and to
potentially act upon and through it. If we want to speak about the politics of
vitalism, this would perhaps be the place – an essence is posited (a genetic
code) at the very same time that such an essence is de-essentialized through an
array of techniques, acts, and practices (sequencing, encoding, decoding,
synthesizing, engineering, etc.).
NRIII: Under the
metaphysics of Capital, where even the market exchanges are themselves
exchangeable for Capital—think of the New York Stock Exchange’s recent public
offering (ticker symbol-NYX); NYX is now tradable on itself—what beautiful
oversight within the self-regulating genius of living Capital!—what protection
from commoditization can a bare or political life be afforded?
ET: I wonder if ‘bare life’ is ever really outside of
systems of value-production and exchange? This is a tough one. Obviously there
are many things that need to be done to raise criticisms and spur interventions
into the pervasive transformation of life forms into tradable commodities. And
a lot of things are being done, from activist campaigns against bioprospecting
in the Third World to NGOs that lobby against unfair trade regulations in
agricultural and animal biotech. So I think it’s important to see this part of
the resistance to bioexchange as part of a larger anti-globalization tendency
(certainly not without its problems, but there you are…). But perhaps the sort
of meta-capital we see with NYX is itself a symptom of a world-view in which
everything is exchangeable in part because everything is connected. I’ve always
thought it would be interesting to study the different, concurrent layers of
global bioexchange – flows of finance capital linked to patents or biotech
start-ups alongside the global-local circulations of ‘emerging infectious
diseases’ (many of which mutate through horizontal gene transfer), and those
alongside the 24/7 public health surveillance systems managed by the WHO and
the CDC. I don’t know, but maybe alongside the already-existing activities we
also need to seriously inquire into the uncanny, anonymous, and nonhuman aspects of what bioexchange
really is. It’s like saying the economy without economics, or exchange without
value…At some level this gets us into Bataille’s territory, in which ‘the
human’ itself is expended…
NRIII: With regard
to genetic materialism and essentialism, and human fate, Anne Scott refers to
the operationalization of ‘bare life’ as a “capitalized genomics”[3] wherein bare life is indeed, I would say, becoming a
currency of the genetic Code, where the Code itself becomes patently tradable
as a social signifier, a form of Capital.
The relationship between Capital and the Code soon becomes undecideable,
no? How might this affect our
metaphysical lives?
ET: Yes, I would agree, and this relation between
capital and code points to your own work – so maybe you should reply to this as
well! Is all capital code, or is all code capital? On the one hand we can – I’m
being historically sloppy here – look at the emergence of political economy in
the 18th century and its attendant fields (demographics, statistics,
population studies) and say that the development of modern forms of
capitalization emerges out of an early ‘informatics’ of the population (this
would be a loose riff on Foucault). On the other hand we can look at the
tendencies towards post-Fordist, immaterial labor and suggest that only with
such forms of capital can something like the patenting of genetic codes take
place. So I’m all with this. But, speaking more to the ‘metaphysics’ that you
mention, I feel that we can place too much causal emphasis on ‘capital’ and’
code’ doing this or doing that. So, if there is indeed an undecidability
between them, to me this raises another issue: the relation between ‘life’ and
‘number.’ Again, we are back to vitalism and the philosophy of biology. Can
‘life’ be reducible to ‘number’? Aristotle would probably say no,
Descartes-Harvey-Hobbes yes, Hegel-Rousseau no, Darwin-Galton yes, Bergson no,
Whitehead maybe, Heidegger ‘whatever’, and so on. Perhaps a more interesting,
and more contemporary approach would be to look at early geneticists like
Jacob, Monod, Crick, and so on, each of whom is doing key research in molecular
genetics, but also writing ‘popular’ articles for a non-specialist audience
talking about the ‘what is life?’ question. It’s interesting – Monod is
resolutely a cybernetician, and the whole thing boils down to a set of
algorithms (though algorithms are certainly not without their own ambiguities),
while Jacob is much more a philosopher, and it’s important to him to go back to
Aristotle and his question concerning psyche
or ‘life-forming spirit.’ Our science fiction films dramatize this life-number
question – mutations are reducible to DNA and yet what is ‘human’ (or even, the
human ‘spirit’) cannot be found anywhere in DNA. So this relation between
‘life’ and ‘number’ is like the relation I mentioned before between ‘life’ and
‘thought.’ If, as Canguilhem suggests, ‘life’ is simply the horizon of our
ability to think about life, then perhaps in biotechnics ‘life’ is that which
calculates and which, because of this, remains external to calculation…
NRIII: In the end,
perhaps we learn that at the core of humanity, to borrow from Žižek, there is
something rather “inhuman”; in fact, such a “gap is thus asserted as inherent
to humanity itself, as the gap between humanity and its own inhuman excess.”[4] We might say
that we ‘walk the line.’
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, August 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
Notes