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Subject: [CTHEORY] Article 165 - Biophilosophy for the 21st Century
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 28, NO 3
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
Article 165 06/09/2005 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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1000 DAYS OF THEORY
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Biophilosophy for the 21st Century
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~Eugene Thacker~
Soul-Meat-Pattern
-----------------
There have only ever been three approaches to thinking about life:
SOUL, MEAT, and PATTERN. Within this trinity is everything deemed to
be animate, living, and vital. 'Soul' is not just the Scholastic,
theological, personal soul, but the Aristotelian principle of life
(~psyche~), the principle of its organization. The vegetative soul of
plants, the animate and sensate soul of animals, and the rational
soul of human beings. The hierarchy of souls is not unlike the Great
Chain of Being, a biological theology of divide-and-hierarchize. By
contrast, 'meat' is brute matter, unthinking mechanism, the clockwork
organism, the ~bete machine~ described by Descartes -- animal or
machine, it makes no difference. Mechanism is, in a sense, a thinking
about life as meat, and meat as lifeless (the life that is lifeless
is meat or machine). Finally, distinct from 'soul' and 'meat' is a
third approach, that of 'pattern.' It would seem that the emphasis on
pattern is a distinctly postmodern phenomenon, the terrain of
cybernetics, information theory, self-organization. But this is only
part of the story. Again, Aristotle the biologist equates form
(~eidos~) and 'soul' as the distinguishing mark between the plant,
the animal, and the human; it is in their mode of organization, how
they self-actualize in time ('if it moves, it's alive'). Yet,
Aristotle is linked to contemporary self-organization research in
that neither can explain how organization occurs, other than to
reiterate that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Thus, 'soul,' 'meat,' and 'pattern' form a trinity. The trinity is
also a triptych: soul in the center, meat on the right-hand side, and
on the left, pattern. An image of thought that continuously switches,
swaps, displaces, and replaces the place-holder that defines life:
from ~psyche~ to mechanism and animal electricity to the 'gemmules'
and 'pangens' to DNA and the 'code of life.' However, these three
approaches do not form a periodization, with Aristotle's ~psyche~
followed by Descartes' clockwork body followed by the genetic code.
Instead, as a trinity-triptych, they form a kind of portrait, a face,
a faciality, a field of black holes and white walls, within which and
upon which is often written: 'life is that whose essence can be
deduced and yet whose essence escapes all deduction.'
Soul-meat-pattern. Each of these posits a central, universal,
external principle of organization that culminates in the living, the
organism, a life-force. We can simply refer to this as the principle
of life, the central concept that structures a whole field of
investigation. Each approach differs in its place-holders, but there
continues to be a transcendental locus that minimally guarantees a
description of life, something that enables one to point and say
'over there...' (or perhaps, 'it's alive...alive!' or again, 'shoot
anything with more than two legs!'). In positing such principles of
organization, the soul-meat-pattern triptych also articulates
boundaries: living-nonliving, organic-inorganic, animate-inanimate,
but also animal-machine, human-animal, human-savage, species, races,
populations, genomes...We can refer to this practice as boundaries of
articulation. Together, the principle of life and the boundaries of
articulation are the two methods through which the West has
ceaselessly reinvented its thinking about life.
Extrinsic life
--------------
There is an inward-turning and an outward-turning aspect of this
thinking. The inward-turning divides, orders, and interrelates
species and types; the outward-turning manages boundaries and
positions the living against the nonliving, making possible an
instrumentality, a standing-reserve. The inward-turning aspect is
metabolic, in that it processes, filters, and differentiates itself
internally; it is the breakdown and production of biomolecules, the
organization of the organs, the genesis of species and races. The
outward-turning aspect is immunologic, for it manages boundaries,
exchanges, passages; it is the self-nonself distinction, the organism
exchanging with its environment, sensing its milieu, the individual
body living in proximity to other bodies. Nevertheless, there is
always something that complicates both aspects. The inward-turning
aspect is just fine until the outward-turning aspect loses its grip
on things. An example is epidemics. An epidemic cannot be limited to
the individual organism, for its very nature is to pass between
organisms, and increasingly, to pass across species borders (and
national borders). What is the unit of analysis for an epidemic?
Likewise, the outward-turning aspect is able to manage boundaries
without problem until the inward-turning aspect is discovered to be
an illusion. For instance, if the outward-turning aspect is that
which posits the individual organism as distinct from its
environment, therefore enabling an instrumental relationship, a
standing reserve, what then is the inward-turning aspect? We would
assume it is the whole spectrum of understanding about that organism
-- its biological, physiological, cognitive processes. But isn't each
of these really a nested, outward-turning aspect in itself? What are
the systems, networks, and pathways of the organism if not nested
layers of the outward-turning aspect? The inward-turning and
outward-turning aspects thus complicate each other ceaselessly, and
it is therefore not inaccurate to describe their relationship, as
Deleuze does, as one of folding (in-folding, out-folding, an
embryology having nothing to do with 'development').
Soul-meat-pattern. Again, this is not a ~telos~, as if to imply that
genetic and information technologies are the most advanced mode of
inward- and outward-turning. Yet, in a time of networks, swarms, and
multitudes, it would seem that the third approach -- that of
'pattern' -- is today dominant in the life sciences (genetics,
genomics), health care (biotech industry), technology (a-life, AI,
networks), war (bioterror, emerging epidemics) and even alternative
scientific viewpoints (biocomplexity, emergence) [1]. A new, vital
pattern pervades systems of all kinds -- global economies, social
systems, immigration patterns, information exchanges, mobile and
wireless communications, and so forth. Despite this, have we rid
ourselves of the divide-and-hierarchize mentality of thinking about
life? Is 'pattern' simply the new 'soul'? Traditionally, these
questions about the principle of life come under the domain of the
philosophy of biology. But what would it mean to invert the
philosophy of biology? What would it mean to invert this thinking
(soul-meat-pattern) and this dualistic method (principles of life,
boundaries of articulation), and consider instead a biophilosophy?
Perhaps it is precisely 'life itself' that is the problem, not the
aim or the goal. Instead of considering the intrinsic properties of
life, what about considering life as extrinsic, as always going
outside of itself? Instead of centering life (an essence, an
organizing principle), what about considering life at the
peripheries? Extrinsic life, a life always going outside of itself,
peripheral life...
Biophilosophy vs. Philosophy of Biology
---------------------------------------
What, then, is biophilosophy? To begin with, biophilosophy is not the
same as the philosophy of biology. What is usually referred to as the
philosophy of biology has both a syntagmatic and a paradigmatic side
to it, a horizontal and vertical dimension to it. The horizontal
dimension is the elucidation of universal characteristics of the
organism which are perceived to be part of its essence or principle
of organization (growth and decay, reproduction and development,
evolutionary adaptation). The vertical dimension is the development
of this thinking historically in Western thought, from Aristotle, to
natural history, to Darwinian evolution, to the new synthesis in
genetics and biochemistry. In general, the philosophy of biology
highlights and extends the philosophical dimensions of biological
knowledge. Issues pertaining to evolution, biological determinism,
dualism, mechanism, and teleology may be considered in the context of
the life sciences such as comparative anatomy, physiology, genetics,
biochemistry, embryology, germ theory, developmental systems theory.
The philosophy of biology informs the three approaches to thinking
about life mentioned above: soul-meat-pattern. The philosophy of
biology also undertakes the twofold method of identifying a principle
of life and boundaries of articulation. It can be understood as an
attempt to pose the question 'is the living different from the
non-living?' -- an ontological question -- in the context of another
question, 'is the study of the living (biology) different from other
fields of study?' -- an epistemological question.
Is biophilosophy simply the opposite of the philosophy of biology?
Not quite. Biophilosophy is certainly a critique of the triptych of
philosophy of biology. But it is also a way of moving through the
soul-meat-pattern approach, while taking with it the radicality of
the ontological questions that are posed, and which often get reduced
to epistemological concerns over classification. Whereas the
philosophy of biology is concerned with articulating a concept of
'life' that would describe the essence of life, biophilosophy is
concerned with articulating those things that ceaselessly transform
life. For biophilosophy, life = multiplicity. Whereas the philosophy
of biology proceeds by the derivation of universal characteristics
for all life, biophilosophy proceeds by drawing out the network of
relations that always take the living outside itself. An extrinsic
diagram as opposed to intrinsic characteristics. Whereas the
philosophy of biology (especially in the 20th century) is
increasingly concerned with reducing life to number (from mechanism
to genetics), biophilosophy sees a different kind of number, one that
runs through life (a combinatoric, proliferating number, the number
of graphs, groups, and sets). Whereas the philosophy of biology
renews mechanism in order to purge itself of all vitalism ('vitalism'
is one of the curse words of biology...), biophilosophy renews
vitalism in order to purge it of all theology (and in this sense
number is vitalistic).
'A life' not A-life
-------------------
The difficulty with the philosophy of biology -- as with nearly all
philosophical thinking of 'the animal' -- is to resist the
anthropomorphism of our thinking about life. The approach of the
philosophy of biology, the approach of soul-meat-pattern, centers and
raises up the concept of the human so that it is not only isomorphic
with life, but so that it may rise above life ('life itself' as the
pinnacle and 'mere life' as the base or foundation). This has a
number of effects on our thinking about life, for it simultaneously
places the human at the top of the Great Chain while also reserving a
qualitatively distinct, non-animal place for the human. This is the
tired drama of the human, at once partaking of the animal, natural,
biological world, and yet incessantly striving above and beyond it,
producing abstract knowledge-systems, constructing world and life,
aspiring for the spiritual (recall Heidegger's thesis concerning
animality: the stone is worldless, the animal is poor-in-world, and
the human is world-building). It is a drama that is by turns tragic
and absurdist. Contemporary bio-art practices can be understood as a
commentary on this drama, producing dadaist mammals, extra ears, pigs
with wings, activist crops, and 'fuzzy biological sabotage' [2].
Biophilosophy implies a critique of all anthropomorphic conceptions
of life. But is it possible to think this nonanthropomorphic life?
Are we determined to yet again supplant a new term ('multiplicity')
for an old one ('pattern')? The problem is not simply a nominalist
one, not simply a game of logic; the problem is the very relation
between 'life' and 'thought' (both Canguilhem and Foucault note that
the most accurate concept of life would be life itself).
Biophilosophy is an approach to nonhuman life, nonorganic life,
anonymous life, indefinite life -- what Deleuze calls 'a life.' But
the trick is to undo conventional biological thinking from within.
Biophilosophy focuses on those modes of biological life that
simultaneously escape their being exclusively biological life:
microbes, epidemics, endosymbiosis, parasitism, swarms, packs,
flocks, a-life, genetic algorithms, biopathways, smart dust,
smartmobs, netwars -- there is a whole bestiary that asks us to think
the life-multiplicity relation.
Life is X
---------
The central question of the philosophy of biology has to do with an
essence of life, a 'principle of life.' What is life? Life is X --
whatever X happens to be, eidos, mechanism, life-force, selection,
code. The concept of 'life itself' promoted by geneticists during the
post-WWII era (the genetic 'coding problem') was a renewal of a
concept articulated by Aristotle in _De anima_ as well as his
'biological' treatises. The implication of the very concept of 'life
itself' is that 'life' is One. Whatever it is, life is one thing,
essentially one thing, for otherwise we could not say 'Life is X.'
Even when life reveals its contradictory nature, that contradiction
is the ineffable key to life. An example is animal motility.
Aristotle posed the question 'what makes the animal go?'; that is,
from where does its energy come? The problem was picked up by
the application of thermodynamics to animal physiology, with talk of
animal 'electricity' and 'irritability' and 'vital forces.' Soon
there was an ineffable 'life force' coursing through the animal,
enabling it to counter the laws of thermodynamics.
Today a similar process is happening with studies in
self-organization and emergence. The question has changed, but its
form of the problem is the same: 'how do simple local actions produce
complex global patterns?' The effects of self-organization can be
analyzed forever (e.g. 'ant colony optimization') and they can be
applied to computer science (e.g. CG in film, telecommunications
routing). But a central mysticism is produced at its core, for if
there is no external, controlling factor (environment, genes,
blueprints) then how can there be control at all? Again, 'life
itself' the ineffable, the absent center. In this sense life follows
the laws of thought: it is self-identical (whatever is living
continues to be so until it ceases to be living), non-contradictory
(something cannot both be living and non-living), and either is or is
not (something either is or is not living, there is no grey zone to
life). It is in this sense that 'life' and 'thought' find their
common meeting point. Biophilosophy implies a critique of the
dialectics of 'life itself.' It abandons the concept of 'life itself'
that is forever caught between the poles of nature and culture,
biology and technology, human and machine. Instead it develops
concepts that always cut across and that form networks: the
molecular, multiplicity, becoming-animal, life-resistance...But the
point is not to simply repeat deleuzianisms, but rather to invent or
diverge: the autonomy of affect, germinal life, wetwares, prevital
transductions, organismic soft control, abstract sex, molecular
invasions, geophilosophy, and what Deleuze calls 'the
mathematico-biological systems of differenc/tiation' [3].
Being, Time, Number
-------------------
The philosophy of biology is an epistemological endeavor, while
biophilosophy is an ontological one. The philosophy of biology asks
'which category?', while biophilosophy asks 'affected or affecting?'
Biophilosophy ceaselessly spins out ontologies, none of them final,
none of them lasting. An example: perhaps what Heidegger pointed to
as the defining philosophical concern of modernity -- Being or
~dasein~ -- has permutated into one of the guiding concerns of the
new millennium -- the problematic of 'life itself' or the ~zoe/bios~
distinction. We are no longer worried about the grand metaphysical
concerns of Being, Time, and the One. Biophilosophy is a permutation
and transmutation of these concerns: not Being but the problematic of
'life itself', a concern that asks us to rethink the concept of the
vital and vitalism. Similarly, the concern with Time has become an
interest in variation, transformation, change -- difference and
repetition (the repetition of the different and the difference of
each repetition). The contemporary interest in the event, becoming,
and the virtual-actual pair are further variations of this. Finally,
the imperative of the One -- that Being is One, that Time is One,
that the subject is singular, that identity is the identification of
the One, even the strange sameness of the Other in ethical thought --
all of this asks us to pose the question: what would we have to do to
the concept of 'number' to think beyond the One-many dichotomy? This
is the question posed by Deleuze's _Difference and Repetition_, but
it is already there in Plato's _Parmenides_. Hair, mud and dirt. Is
there a concept of multiplicity that moves beyond the One-many? Could
such a concept resist a simple denunciation of 'number' (quantity vs.
quality, extensity vs. intensity, explication vs. implication). If
there is a concept of number that runs throughout multiplicity (a
proliferative, pervasive number), and if multiplicity is related to
life, is there a living number -- a ~vitalist matheme~ -- that would
move out of the philosophy of biology's trinity of soul-meat-pattern?
Instead of what Badiou calls the split between the quantitative and
qualitative, the closed and the open, 'number and animal,' is there
an animal number? Being, Time, and the One thus get recombined as
'life itself,' becoming, and number, which in turn ask us to consider
or reconsider vitalism, the virtual, and multiplicity.
Other-than-life
---------------
The philosophy of biology poses the question, 'what is life?' In
doing so, however, it rarely asks the inverse question, 'what is
not-life?' Certainly death is not-life. But so is the rock, the
chair, the clouds. What about the computer, lunch, or a nation-state,
are they not-life as well? What about a doll? Memories? There is a
whole negative classification of not-life implied in the positive
question 'what is life?' Better yet, rather than the question of what
is not-life, we can pose the question of the life that becomes
not-life, an other-than-life, a becoming-nonliving. Four, preliminary
examples:
1. Swarm intelligence: 'Swarm intelligence' is a term currently
used to describe an interdisciplinary research field that
combines the biological studies of 'social insects' with
computer science (especially software algorithms and multi-agent
systems) [4]. Just as a group of insects that are individually
'dumb' are able to collectively self-organize and forage for a
food source or build a nest, so can simple software programs or
robots self-organize in groups and carry out complex tasks. This
local actions-global patterns approach is said to display
'intelligent' or purposeful behavior at the global level. But we
can also question and repurpose the term 'swarm intelligence,'
for the tendency in this thinking is to always search for a
higher-level unity which would be the guarantee of organization
and order. Call it a 'superorganism' or a 'hive mind,' the
implication is that purposeful activity can only occur through a
process of meta-individualizing all group phenomena, subjecting
the many-as-many to a renewed concept of the One. Action must
come after individuation, not vice-versa. However the unique
thing about insect swarms and other animal groups (packs,
flocks, schools) is not just that there is no leader, but that
there is something akin to a fully distributed control. Thus the
political paradox of insect societies -- how to understand this
balance between control and emergence, sovereignty and
multiplicity? And thus the paradoxical question of the field of
swarm intelligence -- can it be coded? Can one in fact engineer
distributed control? Or are we stuck at the level of passive
observers, limited in our ability to identify swarm
intelligence, but helpless to enact it? What would have to be
done to the concept of action in order to make of swarm
intelligence a political concept? If there is a swarm
intelligence, the 'intelligence' would surely have to be a
frustratingly anonymous, nonanthropomorphic intelligence, the
intelligence of 'a life.'
2. Headless animality: The philosophy of biology is not only
concerned with the unity of life ('Life is X'), but it ties this
unity to the individual organism. Whether in natural history's
classifications, Darwinian speciation, or the study of genomes,
biology always begins from the individual. The individual is the
starting point, the basic unit of study. Throughout all these
levels, the organism has remained central. Organisms not only
form species, but they are also formed by molecules and cells;
organisms are the ideal point of mediation between the
microscopic and macroscopic views of life. Thus it is no
surprise to find philosophy raising the human above the animal
based on the comparison of individual organisms. Aristotle,
Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau: the individual organism is
the most basic unit through which the human is raised above the
animal, the beast, the savage. This is especially the case when
groups are concerned. Here insects are the privileged case
study, perhaps the paradigmatic case of the not-human. Indeed,
political thought has often contrasted the human and the insect
precisely on this point. Hobbes notes that while both we and
insects are 'social,' only we can lay down rights to establish a
sovereign; Marx notes that insects also produce and build, but
humans are able to abstract and plan before building. Thus even
groups are individuals. Groups are composed of individuals that
pre-exist them, and groups themselves form meta-individuals
('species,' 'races'). But there are also extrinsic group
animals, the multiplicity-animals of packs, flocks, swarms. Yes,
swarms can be understood to be composed of individual insects.
But what if swarms, packs, and so on are actually inversions of
the organism? What if they are instances in which the many
pre-exist the One? An army ant swarm does have a morphogenetic
aspect to it: there is a swarm front, a bivouac, and branching
paths. But swarms, packs, flocks, schools are also defined
precisely by their shapelessness and formlessness. They have no
'head' let alone a 'face.' They are headless animals, acephalous
animality. They are animality without head or tail, polysensory,
poly-affective, 'amorphous but coordinated' [5].
3. Molecular molecules: To begin with, we can suggest that
molecules are not 'molecular.' As non-sensical as this sounds,
it is important to understand the molecule as one in a whole
series of units of composition and analysis: the organism, the
organ, the tissue, the cell, the molecule. Each science of life
is not just a noun (anatomy, biology) but also a verb
('anatomizing,' 'biologizing') in which the living is both
analyzed and built up. What is the smallest unit of composition?
This is also the first unit of analysis. Building up, breaking
down. The process of individuation is central to thinking about
life, whether it be about the 'building blocks of life' or the
'code of life.' There are always 'powers of ten' in biology, a
huge, ontological microscope that stratifies individuals (the
'DNA makes RNA makes proteins, and proteins make us' mantra of
molecular genetics). But what if all this has nothing to do with
scale, or with strata, or with layering? There is a whole
forgotten history of molecular biology which de-emphasizes the
search for 'the' molecules (proteins or nucleic acids), and
instead focuses on the relationality of molecules, their network
dynamics, their temporal existence on the 'edge of chaos'
(biocomplexity). On the one hand biology tells us that molecules
build up and break down (some proteins break down molecules,
others build up). But on the other hand a cursory look at
microbes shows us the radical horizontality of molecules:
symbiotic bacteria, contagious viruses, and horizontal gene
transfer between microbes. An epidemic is molecular, but it is
also social, technological, economic, political. Networks of
infection, yes, but also networks of contagion, transportation,
vaccination, quarantine, surveillance. This compression of
networks, this topological intensification, is not the result of
molecules, but is 'molecular.' A microbial life that has nothing
to do with scale (micro- vs. macro-), but that is at once local
and global. Even the common biological processes of gene
expression, cell metabolism, and membrane signaling routinely
create linkages and relations (microbe-animal-human), or rather
they produce univocity-through-assemblages.
4. Lifelike death: We speak excitedly about the ways that new
technologies are 'life-like,' meaning the way that technology --
something devoid of life -- is able to display characteristics
or behaviors that for us approximate life. But it is never clear
if the lifelike is a category of representation (the lifelike
quality of the 'oval portrait'), performance ('never mind the
man behind the curtain'), or simulation ('what is real, Neo?').
Our own obsession is to constantly desire and yet worry about
the lifelike: we want our phones to speak to us, but only if
they say the right things. In popular culture, science fiction
repeatedly plays out these scenarios where we produce a
technical life in our own image, a fusion of technology and life
in which the human constantly reproduces itself. Perhaps another
approach to the lifelike is not to do with life or technology at
all, but the lifelikeness of death. There is, in fact, a whole
demonology of the lifelike to be considered. In popular culture,
genre horror gives us many examples of lifelike death: zombies
(the living dead), vampires (the undead), the phantasm (the
disembodied spirit), and the demon (the possessed life). This is
the lifelikeness of life passing away, going beyond itself,
exiting itself. It is no mistake that these figures of lifelike
death are often inhabited by fearfully ambivalent agents:
viruses infecting the living dead, the 'bad blood' of the
vampire, the phantasm enslaved my memory, and the demonic
tearing of soul from body. Lifelike death is not the celebratory
lifelikeness of our intelligent machines, but the ambivalent
attitude towards a life that should not be living, an unholy
life. This lifelike death is aporetic life: the dead that walk,
the immortal being that is also the basest animals (bats, rats),
the materialized spirit, the familiar face distorted beyond
recognition. Perhaps there is a technoscientific side to this
after all. For, wouldn't the limit-case of lifelike death be the
point at which the organic can no longer be distinguished from
the inorganic, the material from the immaterial? This is the
domain of nanotechnology, the idea of inorganic life,
programmable matter, an undiscovered 'occult media.'
Ancient Life (or, the Biology of Cthulhu)
-----------------------------------------
'Biophilosophy for the 21st century' is an ambiguous statement.
Biophilosophy does not begin with information networks,
biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, or intelligent software. In a
sense, Presocratic thinking is biophilosophical thinking. Heraclitus
refers to a nonorganic life in this three examples of fire
(formlessness in identity), flows (stepping into the river), and the
body (stability through growth and decay). A common ~logos~ to all
change. His opposite -- but in many ways his compliment -- is
Parmenides, whose concept of the All-One attempts to comprehend
multiplicity as another form of univocity. And then there are the
Greek atomists, particles infinitely dense and mobile...
Immediately a dissenting point is raised: 'are we not being reductive
in our concept of life, as if life were only biological life, and not
social, cultural, economic, religious and political life as well?'
Indeed, isn't the problem the way in which biological and biomedical
life has come to be the foundation of our emerging 'biopolitical'
regimes? This 'bare life' serves as the alpha and the omega of social
and political life, at once safeguarding the security of 'the
population' while also producing a state of exception, a state of
emergency, in which 'bare life' is both under attack and the object
of preemptive strikes. Undoubtedly. Except that this cordons off our
ability to think about life within the chess-match between
disciplines. To the scientist who says 'life is genetic code' there
is the sociologist who says 'life is the discriminatory
implementation of genetics.' To the physicist who says 'life is the
self-organization of matter and energy' the political scientist says
'life is the struggle between human groups to instrumentalize natural
resources.' To the humanities professor who says 'life is the set of
metaphors we forget are metaphors,' there is the engineer who designs
'programmable matter' and 'smart dust.' Once in a while, there are
synergistic couplings, noisesome crosstalk that produces monsters: in
the 1980s there was talk of chaos, in the 1990s talk of complexity,
and crossing the millennium talk of networks. Or so the story goes.
Perhaps we would like to do away with disciplines; and yet, for all
the talk of 'third cultures' we still find the two cultures in the
most banal, everyday instances.
This not a manifesto. All the same, there are a number of
misconceptions to address concerning biophilosophy. Biophilosophy is
not a naive embrace of 'life,' a belief in the altruistic holism of
all life on the planet. It is, however, a rigorous questioning of the
twofold method of the philosophy of biology (principle of life,
boundaries of articulation), and the divisions that are produced from
this. Biophilosophy always asks, 'what relations are precluded in
such-and-such a division, in such-and-such a classification?'
Biophilosophy is not and should not be simply another name for
self-organization, emergence, or complexity. While there is a fertile
exchange between philosophy and biology on this point, it is clear
that the sciences of complexity are unable to think both
ontologically and politically as well. More often than not, they
create a new portrait of nature (a nonlinear, metastable, complex
nature), or worse, they subsume all non-natural elements under this
new nature (thus free markets and/or 'democracy' are self-organizing
and therefore inevitable). Not everything comes under the domain of
biophilosophy, but at the same time one of biophilosophy's major
concerns is the supposed foundationalism of biology and the
biological-biomedical definitions of life. Biophilosophy is not
simply a new vitalism, arguing for the ineffability and
irreducibility of life's description. Yet this is perhaps the most
frustrating and ambivalent aspect of biophilosophy. Biophilosophy is
an attempt to draw out a political ontology, and yet it is also
politically agonistic, even apathetic. There is no ~ressentiment~ in
biophilosophy; only a commitment to a 'vital politics' accompanied by
this 'molecular-wide' perspective. Biophilosophy picks up and
reinvigorates the ontological questions left behind by the philosophy
of biology. Why 'life'?
Notes:
------
[1] See my article 'Networks, Swarms, Multitudes' in _CTHEORY_
(2004): part one (http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=422) and
part two (http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=423).
[2] In particular, see the work of SymbioticA
(http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au), a group of artists and scientists
engaged in exploring cell and tissue culturing techniques as artistic
practice. In a different vein, Critical Art Ensemble
(http://www.critical-art.net) has, for some years, explored the
relationships between activism, art, and biotechnology.
[3] Aside from _A Thousand Plateaus_, see Deleuze's comments on life
as 'resistance' in _Foucault_. Sean Hand, trans. London: Continuum,
1999. For a sampling of other divergings from life, see Keith Ansell
Pearson, _ Germinal Life_, New York: Routledge, 1999; Alain Badiou,
"Of Life as a Name of Being, or Deleuze's Vitalist Ontology," _Pli:
The Warwick Journal of Philosophy_ 10, 2000, 174-91; Mark Bonta and
John Protevi, _Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary_,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004; Critical Art Ensemble,
_The Molecular Invasion_, Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2002; Manuel
Delanda, "Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Form," _South
Atlantic Quarterly_ 96.3, Summer 1997: 499-514; Richard Doyle,
_Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living_, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2004; Miriam Fraser, Sarah Kember, and Celia
Lury, "Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism," _Theory,
Culture & Society_ 22.1, 2005, 1-14; Mark Hansen, "Becoming as
Creative Involution?: Contextualizing Deleuze and Guattari's
Biophilosophy," _Postmodern Culture_ 11.1, 2000; Adrian Mackenzie,
"Bringing Sequences to Life: How Bioinformatics Corporealizes
Sequence Data," _New Genetics and Society_ 22.3 (2003): 315-32;
Lucianna Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the
Mutations of Desire_, London: Continuum, 2004; Luciana Parisi and
Tiziana Terranova, "Heat-Death: Emergence and Control in Genetic
Engineering and Artificial Life," _CTHEORY_, 2000:
http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=127; Eugene Thacker,
_Biomedia_, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
[4] For a quick overview, see Eric Bonabeau and Guy Theraulaz, "Swarm
Smarts," _Scientific American_ (March 2000): 72-79. For a more
thorough, and more technical introduction, see Bonabeau and
Theraulaz, _Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems_,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
[5] This is the phrase often used by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt
in their book on military swarming, _Swarming and the Future of
Conflict_, Santa Monica: RAND, 2000.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Eugene Thacker is Assistant Professor in the School of Literature,
Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is
the author of _Biomedia_ and _The Global Genome: Biotechnology,
Politics, and Culture_.
_____________________________________________________________________
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