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What Can Biotechnology Do?
Process-events vs the Bio-logic of Life
Luciana Parisi
The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture
by Eugene Thacker
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
Abstract
This essay is an occasion to discuss the critical trajectories of a now common
field of enquiry concerned with the impact of biomediatic technologies on
politics and culture. Thacker’s book The Global Genome importantly sits
between debates about biopower as the governance of life and biopolitics
as the transformation of what life can be. In particular, the book advances
the hypothesis that as information produces ‘life itself’, so it has become
central to a political economy of excess and surplus value. In other words,
information does not dematerialize biology. Bioinformatics and biotech
informationalize the living and rematerialize biology. As biotech becomes
central to biopower, the global genome comes to reigning profit, labour,
racism, biocolonialism, biosecurity, and bioart. However, Thacker’s reliance
on a bio-ontology of life grounding all relations of power leaves no space
for process-events to break the chain of life’s perpetual reproduction.
Key words
bioinformatics ■ bio-ontology ■ biopower
W
HEN, IN the late 1980s, popular culture and science fiction drew
attention to a new kind of biotechnological pervasiveness directly
investing matter in its molecular composition, from DNA to
proteins, it was like a dark and stormy precursor for an inevitable transformation of the biopolitical order. At the end of the 1970s, when the first
■ Theory, Culture & Society 2009 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 26(4): 155–163
DOI: 10.1177/0263276409104973
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biotech industries emerged, concepts such as cybernetic organism, thermodynamic system and autopoietic structure were already implicated in the
everyday production of a new kind of profit directly investing the biological
body. However, as these concepts spread through the popular culture of
cyberpunk, the image of a technocapitalist future operating by stealth
became increasingly pervasive.
The striking feature of the emerging biotech commerce was the sharp
delineation of the new tendency of technocapital to derive profit not from
the actual work of useful energy, but from the potentiality of a not-yetactualized productivity, deriving surplus value from code and flux, as
Deleuze and Guattari (1983) call it. This intensive production, embedded in
the machinic fusion of discrete algorithms (triggering the capacity to
engender new value out of the synergetic communion of distinct codes), had
then entered the core of a political economy of virtual profit: profit without
an object.
The biotech complex of potential commodities, from pharmacogenetics
to genetic therapy, from IVF to cloning, from transgenesis to ectogenesis,
had indeed marked a pivotal turning point in the evolution of the capitalization of bio-informatic matter, indicating the shift from the e-commerce
boom, the rise and fall of information-loaded Internet culture, to biocommerce, the rise and infinite re-potentialization of the biological once
turned informational.
This new tendency for potential profit perhaps needs to be related to
the passage from the first wave to the second wave of cybernetics evident
in a new concern with bio-informational systems (Hayles, 1999). The limits
of the calculation of probabilities exposed by the Turing machine pointed
to the existence of a system within a system, a metacommunication between
distinct scales of order driven by a dynamics of self-organization governed
by the irreversible arrow of time. Cybernetician Norbert Wiener (1989) was
to sit at the edge of a double-faced conception of bio-information that can
be tied to the idea of autopoiesis (self-making). Wiener had a probabilistic vision of the universe: out of an entropic sea of disorder, a set of probable
islands of bio-order or life could form. The entropic tendency of a system
to run out of equilibrium and return to a state of chaos coincided with a
constant noise roaming in the background of the order of life. Such a
dissipative tendency of energy, however, inversely corresponded to informatic order. Entropy – as the measure of dissipation of energy – was
counterbalanced by a negentropic tendency
The capacity of dissipative energy to become organized into information explained how probabilities could be calculated out of chaos. The
negentropic resolution to entropic heat-death, already highlighted by
Gregory Bateson (2000), became crucial for the development of the concept
of autopoiesis, which was imported into cybernetics from theoretical biologists Maturana and Varela (1987 [1972]). The principle of self-organization or autopoiesis synthesizes the passage to second-wave cybernetics, a
new technoscientific phase directly implicated in the advancement of a new
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ethico-aesthetic paradigm, intended, as Guattari (1996) points out, to define
the experiential relation between informatics, power and knowledge.
This new cybernetic phase has been crucial to the development of the
biotech industry and, as Thacker clearly discusses in The Global Genome,
to the politico-economical concept of power operating on and as life itself.
It is not by chance that the works of Foucault, from ‘The Birth of
Biopolitics’ (1997) to ‘Society Must Be Defended’ (2003), have become
compulsory references in the cross-disciplinary field of political philosophy,
technoscience and cultural studies, engaging with the politico-economic
system of control concerned with the transformation of dissipative energy
into useful information, and with the governance of chaotic living forces,
turning them into profitable order.
The self-organization of energy into probabilities of order, useful sets
of information, has provided a model for articulating the modalities and
modifications of political power as well as politico-economical control since
Foucault’s descriptions of the emergence of a new apparatus of power, that
is, biopower, operating directly on the living body and on the forces of life.
In particular, if we consider the recent work of Lazzarato (2002) on the transformation of biopower into biopolitics, we learn that Foucault’s concern for
biopolitics as ‘a government–population–political economy relationship’
(2003: 110), a dynamics of forces that establish a new tension between
ontology and politics, is at the core of the contemporary phase of technocapitalist power. According to Lazzarato, contrary to the Marxist economic
critique of labour, Foucault addresses a political economy of forces governing ‘the whole of a complex material field’, an immanent and strategic coordination of living forces. Here life and living being become a matter of
governance but also a matter of production of new forms of life, the engendering of new ontologies, styles, utterances of ‘what counts as worth living’.
For Lazzarato, the transformation of biopower into biopolitics is a necessary
political project breaking with the dominance of the Marxist logic of
exchange so as to embrace the production of events.
Similarly, and in contrast with Foucault’s epistemic view of biopower,
Agamben (2004) has argued that in the new political-economic configuration of power, the distinction between zoē, or bare life, and bios, or political, qualified life, has disappeared. While such a distinction was
constitutive of the Aristotelian and Greek polity, feeding upon the alwaysalready excluded bare life, for Agamben the loss of such a distinction is the
symptom of the impossibility of a truly political ontology, which has now
been transformed into life in general, reduced to the condition of bare life
(2004: 38). For Agamben, however, biopower is not a modern invention but
is constitutive of the model of sovereignty in the West. Biopower as an
architecture of exception is the motor of sovereign ontology.
On the contrary, Foucault’s insistence on the ontological constitution
of biopolitics in modernity, where forces of life have themselves become
agents for political governance, highlights rather than rejects the epochal
transformation of the Aristotelian conception of energy. In particular, the
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conception of potential energy as that which is ready to be exhausted in
political action (bare life as the fuel of political life) has been completely
transformed for Foucault by a dissipative view of the universe, where energy
is never exhausted but transduced into probabilities, or information,
realized through negentropic complexification, the autopoietic organization
of energy in new orders of life. For Foucault, the formation of biopower and
the deployment of biopolitics directly imply the utilization of useless flow
or dissipative energy, defined in terms of force, à la Nietzsche, as the inexhaustible potential for generating the negentropic production of events.
Eugene Thacker’s book The Global Genome needs to be located within
this growing field concerned with the relation between the biological, the
political and the economic in the aftermath of the biotechnological transformation of life into information. This book comes straight after his first
monograph Biomedia (2004), which already addressed the novel power of
bio-informatics to be able to nest together genetic and computer codes,
ultimately turning life into programmable data. Biomedia indeed contained
in embryonic form the arguments and the approaches more largely developed in The Global Genome. Here, from its very onset, the analysis of biological and technological systems clearly focuses on the politico-economics of
life vis-à-vis biotechnologies. Differently from Biomedia, Thacker here aims
to weave together technoscience with economics, popular culture with
aesthetics, politics with bio-informatics. Furthermore, a vaster set of topics,
arguments, literatures and issues animates this much longer (maybe too
long) intervention in the field of biopower.
The Global Genome pays detailed attention to the concept of information in the context of biotech as constitutive of the biological ontology of life
itself. As Thacker argues, ‘information in biopolitics is precisely that which
can account for the material and embodied and, furthermore, that which can
produce the material, the embodied, the biological, the living – “life itself”’
(p. 28). Thacker is particularly concerned with the implications of information for globalization, where he clearly singles out capital’s tendency to
invest in the very complexity of the biological and thus pointing to the new
biopolitical command over ‘life itself’, exposing the tension between the
biological and the political.
A two-fold problem is at the core of this book, which shows how the
biotech industry is entangled with the process of globalization, and how such
industry carries out the integration between biology and informatics. Here
biotechnology sits between the economic and the political, biology and
informatics, the global and the local, profit and labour, racism and biocolonialism, biosecurity and bioterrorism, normativity and biotechnical
time, aesthetics and bio-art, biotech fiction and popular culture. Indeed, bios
now turned into biotech is the mediator par excellence of a very large list of
themes, all interlaced and superimposed, all simultaneously kept together
by a bio-mega-apparatus of power.
In order to do so, the book is divided into nine chapters forming three
main sections, a final appendix and (always useful) a glossary. Each section
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is completely self-contained. There is no linear sequence between the
chapters but each engages anew with biotech from a different angle. While
this may, and indeed does, risk adding superfluous repetitions throughout
the book, at the same time this structural arrangement clearly denotes a
compulsive intellectual effort on the part of Thacker to ensure consistency
across different literatures, aiming to show the common problematic – the
politico-economics of life itself – shared by distinct ontologies. For example,
while it may be noted that the ontological divergence between Marx and
Bataille, Negri and Virilio, Foucault and Agamben, Fanon and Guattari, are
not fully deployed, it remains evident that Thacker’s method aims at delineating an ample critical field of study, intending to show the relevance of
classical politico-economic theories to the new context of bio-informatics.
The main sections are: ‘Encoding’ or production, the process of
encoding the biological (chs 1–3), ‘Recoding’ or distribution, database
management and computer networking (chs 4–6), and ‘Decoding’ or
consumption, the rematerialization of the biological through technology (chs
7–9).
The first section introduces the concept of the global genome
explained through the function of biological exchange, the circulation and
distribution of biological information, at once material and immaterial, but
mediated by one or more value systems (p. 7). While most common views
on informationalization point to the digitization of the biological, Thacker
importantly addresses the centrality of the network properties of biology,
which define the formulation of biology as equalling information. Biological
exchanges conceive of life itself as informatic, and, in doing so, biological
exchanges ‘informationalize’ without simply dematerializing life. For biological exchange implies that biology is information and information is both
material and immaterial (p. 20). Thacker extends Foucault’s biopolitics to
argue for the ongoing regulation of the bio-informatic’s inclusion of ‘life
itself’ in the political domain (p. 28), but he also endeavours to find out
‘[w]hat is the specific biopolitics of biotechnologies?’ The answer lies with
biotech’s understanding of biology as technology, ‘a productive technology
in its own right’ (p. 45).
Chapters 2 and 3 closely focus on biotech as the economic value of
the ‘stuff of life’. While drawing on Canguilhem’s concept of ‘life itself’ as
that which resists death – or entropy – and is instead embedded in biological materiality, Thacker further develops a parallel reading of Marx as
bioinformatician. This allows his argument to reveal that ‘life itself’ resists
the M–C–M process since this cycle is inevitably implicated in the biophysical creative processes of the organism. Since profit can only be
obtained by the investment of power in living labour, things go astray
and the metabolic capitalization of life can never simply reach exact
equations. The capitalization of life cannot incorporate the bio-physicality
of the living.
The surplus power of life over and above its apparatus of encoding
leads Thacker to engage straightforwardly with Bataille’s philosophy of
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excess. The centrality of junk DNA or non-coding regions of DNA in bioinformatics indeed defines how genomics is embedded in the performance
of two intertwined functions: ‘the production of an excess of genetic information and the development of new technologies for managing that excess’
(p. 95). Thacker points out that biotech and bio-informatics illustrate the
tendency of capital to take over the production of excess itself. If databases
are tools of management of such excess, including a certain level of unproductive expenditure, one may be tempted to consider excess as a
negentropic producer of order. Indeed, isn’t excess – useless flow – precisely
what animates bio-informatics capital, ready to turn potential energy into
useful information? What if excess defines not a ‘noneconomic relation
between labour and capital’ (p. 95) but capital’s schizophrenic source of
profit composed of distinct yet connected events?
While at times Thacker seems to argue precisely for the negentropic
order of bio-informatics, at other times it remains unclear whether biotech
and bio-informatics are always-already turning life forces into a new mode
of profit or whether these forces are breaking away from the cycle of profit.
An oscillation between a biopolitics over life and a biopolitics of life remains
constantly present and, to some extent, unresolved throughout the book.
Perhaps such oscillation is meant to tackle precisely the double face of
biopower and biopolitics, the capture and the expression of the potentialities of production, the force of life itself to produce and to be produced.
A bio-ontology of apparent dialectical contradiction between biology
and information pervades the entire book. While on the one hand the
politico- economy of life itself produces value out of the bio-informatic
transformation of life into capitalizable information, on the other hand life
as autopoietic force of organization imbued in the biological body itself
always acts to resist the perfect translation of the biological into information. For Thacker this is not a contradiction but a coexistent modality of
biopower. However, as the reader reaches the end of the book, she may still
remain perplexed as to how such coexistence may be able to invent a novel
intervention into the all-encompassing politico-economic bio-logic of life
itself, based on the principle of exchange. In other words, The Global
Genome dwells on crucial debates on biopower as involved in the transformation in cybernetic thinking from entropic disorder to negentropic and
autopoietic organization. However, in the end, the reader seems to be left
with the idea that the politico-economics of bio-informatic life itself, where
biology and information result in one equation defining at once the agent
and the object of power, may subtend the relation between science and
philosophy, ontology and epistemology, politics and aesthetics to a transcendental bio-logic of life as the absolute mediator of all material processes or
events. What if, one may ask, the material stuff of life may be neither biological nor informatic? What if such material stuff is a fabric of relationality, the processes of continuity and discontinuity between the physical and
the immaterial? If the bio-logic of bio-informatic life is the same as ‘life
itself’, then where has the process-event between the physical and the
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transcendent been left? Does the solution to the politico-economy of bioinformatic life always-already reside in life-itself, the ultimate ground of all
material processes, or is it the case, as Guattari suggests (2000), of inventing new problems leading to the construction of an ethico-aesthetic
paradigm able to engage with technoscience without reinforcing the predominant bio-ontology of power: the negentropic complexification of life?
The second section shifts the discussion towards biocolonialism, the
capacities of biotech to intervene directly in the selection of life, of what
counts as life. The normative redefinition of population through the lenses
of the computer database determines race not simply biologically but informatically, through a mathematical proof of racial identification. A new
reconfiguration of the discourse of biodiversity is at stake here, a ‘race-war’
intended as a biological relationship neutralizing biodifferences in monocultures, where the bodies of the colonized are territories or properties to
be acquired insofar as these can be modulated at the level of informatics
(p. 164).
Thacker clearly shows that the concept of information is not politically neutral. However, one may be tempted to ask how it may be possible
to challenge the problem of bio-informatics’ racism without reiterating the
structure of power that predetermines biotech and bio-informatics. Thacker
asks: ‘How, by what tactics, and by what techniques is bioinformatics reinterpreting and reincorporating cultural differences?’ Here one could add:
how is biotech implicated in the production of novel concepts of race,
ethnicities? How is biotech challenging what we know about the biological order of life? How is technoscience invested in the transformation of
the ontology of bio-value and bio-labour? Perhaps these questions may
lead Thacker’s approach to science, philosophy and politics not towards a
discursive critique of technoscience, but rather towards a novel engagement with what counts as scientific enterprise, insofar as science, as
Whitehead (2004 [1920]) argues, is implicated in the process of nature, its
events. The transformation of a physical object into a scientific object is
never simply a matter of knowledge, but primarily of experience conceived
in terms of what happens to matter in prehensive activities: events of
processual materiality.
The last section (‘Decoding’) is the place where Thacker more
directly engages with the question of a novel production of thought on
biotech vis-à-vis the politico-economics of life. The discussion of regenerative medicine and tissue engineering may indeed work to challenge
precisely the philosophy of nature predicated on optimization and normativity. What can these technosciences do? What can bio-informatics tell
us of the series of events that deploy the processual composition of a no
longer inert nature? It is interesting how the book poses the last chapter
as an invitation to think biotech tactically by adopting the discourse of
tactical media and post-media, focusing on bio-art practices, and intending to put knowledges into play in new contexts: a sort of experimental
work in progress.
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An important reference to Guattari’s attempt at formulating a new
ethico-aesthetic paradigm, where new modes of subjectivity are being
articulated in the age of information technologies, is explicitly presented
to the reader as the delineation of a third pathway, implying not simply
power or knowledge but also self-transformation. How can one conceive
of a mode of self-making that will serve as an alternative to either the
pathway of power or the pathway of knowledge at the core of biopower?
How to create the conditions for new existential territories? These are the
questions that Thacker poses to the reader as an invitation to think and
experiment with new modes of subjectivity as implicated in science and
technology: new modes of conceiving and experiencing the subject in
relation to technology (p. 306). The most important issue here is not
whether The Global Genome succeeds in showing what these new modes
of subjectivity are. It seems instead more urgent to think how new modes
of subjectivity can be invented by other means. For the construction of an
ethico-aesthetic subjectivity, simply to feed on the autopoietic and negentropic bio-logic of life itself may not suffice. Perhaps it is time to turn
towards a third cybernetic wave more directly concerned with the abstract
texture of material processes, the series of events implicated in technoculture, with a nature in transit, autonomous from an all-encompassing
onto-bio-logic of life.
References
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Luciana Parisi is the Convener of the Interactive Media MA at Goldsmiths
College, University of London. In 2004 she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum Press).
Currently she is writing a monograph on soft architecture and the metaphysics of computational culture. [email: L.Parisi@gold.ac.uk]
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