Abstract Sex
Luciana Parisi
Vol #, Winter/Spring
[…W]e have seen […] that it is most closely-allied forms, – varieties
of the same species, and species of the same genus or of related genera,
– which, from having nearly the same structure, constitution, and habits,
generally come into the severest competition with each other; consequently
each new variety or species, during the progress of its formation, will
generally press hardest on its nearest kindred, and tend to exterminate
them. We see the same process of extermination amongst our domesticated
productions, through the selection of improved forms by man. Many
curious instances could be given showing how quickly new breeds of cattle,
sheep, and other animals, and varieties of flowers, take the place of older
and inferior kinds.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species,
Whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development
of Life, upon its surface, the development of Society, of Government, of
Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this
same evolution of the simple into the complex, through a process of
continuous differentiation, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable
cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilisation, we shall find
that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous,
is that in which Progress essentially consists…
Herbert Spencer, ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’,
The Bacterial Assembly
In , Lynn Margulis’ research into bacterial mitochondrial transmission
called into question the foundations of Darwinism and neo-Darwinism.
Margulis argued that mitochondria, organelles residing in the body of
nucleated animal and plant cells, are in fact descendents of free-living bacteria.
Enclosed in their mitochondrial membranes, these ancient bacteria have an
independent genetic apparatus of their own, but were at some stage – possibly
the moment in which oxygen entered the atmosphere million years ago –
captured within the cell body, outside the nucleus.
However they found their way into the cell body originally, the presence
of mitochondrial messenger material outside the nucleus of the host cell
constitutes a parallel process of transmission long unknown to science and
unaccounted for within the Darwinian paradigm. Like all bacteria, these
mitochondria reproduce, but their genetic transfer is non-linear and takes place
only by way of the mother. It would seem that nucleic transmission is not the
Abstract Sex
exclusive determinant of the evolution of the organism after all; indeed, nucleic
DNA is itself altered by the mitochondrial material that surrounds it. In other
words, there are not one but two parallel and mutually infecting channels of
genetic communication that determine the organism’s development. Indeed,
within the same species, the nucleic germline and the bacterial somaline exhibit
differential rates of mutation. From these findings, Margulis has revolutionised
the classical evolutionary understanding of the development of life.
Margulis’ work draws on that of Russian scholar-biologist, Konstantin
S. Mereschovsky, who, in the first quarter of the th century, had already
rejected the Darwinian theory of natural selection and invented the term
‘symbiogenesis’ to describe the prolonged symbiotic, parasitic associations that
precede the appearance of a new organism – ‘guest’ bacterium, entering the
cell, takes part in a transfer of DNA information with those ‘host’ bacteria
already present. Bacteria move across phyla without regard, altering the genetic
material of each lineage as they go.
Dismissed for a long time, symbiogenesis is acquiring a constitutive
scientific importance, supported by biochemistry and molecular biology’s
questioning of the classical division between the plant and animal kingdoms
and the classifications based on this division. Symbiotic processes now, in
fact, seem to explain the emergence of the cellular and genetic modifications
of sex and reproduction, disrupting the ‘zoo-centrism’ of the theory of
evolution (the priority of Homo sapiens) in demonstrating that ‘each animal
cell is, in fact, an uncanny assembly, the evolutionary merger of distinct
bacterial metabolisms’.
Biotechnology: The Oldest Science
In this sense, not only are genetic engineering and cloning not new, but they
are not even particularly innovative complexifications of life. Instead, they
strongly resemble the trading of genes invented by bacteria . billion years
ago – non-nucleated cells transmitting information without copulation. Perhaps
all that is marked by ‘biotech’ – the human recombination of genetic material
between independent cellular bodies – is the re-emergence of the most ancient
sex: bacterial sex.
But biotechnologies such as transgenics and cloning – insofar as they entail
the horizontal transfer of genetic material, the re-engineering of cells across
species barriers – do expose new levels of symbiotic mixture. For bacteria
and endosymbiotic parasitism, they mark a new threshold – a new channel
for a bacterial trading that will not remain constricted to the intentions of the
. Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ; Dorion Sagan,
‘Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity’, Incorporation, New York: Zone Books, , pp. –; Lynn
Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, , pp. –.
. Sagan, , op. cit., p. .
I, Cyborg: Reinventing the Human
scientists who opened it. Transgenesis accelerates differential mutations in
patterns of evolution so that biotechnologies – used, for example, to improve
organs and cell transplants, make insulin or produce new cells and tissues
for ‘cell therapies’ – are in fact promoting parallel, unknowable, non-filial
recombinations of genetic sequences and cellular compounds that favour the
emergence and re-emergence of new viruses alongside new generations of
mutant vegetables, insects, fish, reptiles, sheep and humans. No longer species or
individuals, forms or functions, transgenesis highlights evolution’s underlying
pattern: packs of relations between bodies that engineer new bodies. It is simply
not accurate to say that genetic engineering is technology’s colonisation of
the biological; at the same time, the biological is abducting the transmission
layer that biotechnology produces.
What is produced in this cross-colonisation of the biological and the
technological layers of organisation is a bio-digital assemblage, a symbiotic
modification of matter that is not part of any natural ‘design’. The bio-digital
assemblage of bodies – a mouse and a microchip, a virus and a human organism
– propagates the tendencies of symbiotic matter and accelerates the turbulent
and unexpected swerves of non-linear DNA transmission. Micro-mutations
within and across species are enabled and accelerated. The tendencies of
the bio-digital assemblage of matter are non-linear, and the transactions
between various chronological moments – the biological, the technological,
the biotechnological – take place via the nexus of symbiotic contagion.
At this nexus, bio-digital sex catalyses the emergence and re-emergence
of unprecedented life forms.
Re-Mapping DNA
According to the central belief of evolutionary dynamics and embryology,
nucleic DNA – the germline – is the true organiser of life, that which decides
the destiny of parts. Cloning, on the contrary, suggests that somatic substances
themselves have specific abilities and potentials of individuation unknown
to nucleic DNA, and that it is not nucleic DNA that determines variation.
Via the movement of bacterial DNA in and through physical space – through
the membranes of phyla and species, through time, folded into layers of
sedimentation or re-emerging into the atmosphere in one of Earth’s eruptions –
DNA’s linear transmission and progressive evolution are, in fact, thoroughly
and constantly disrupted through intensive bacterial trades.
According to neo-Darwinists, sexual reproduction has been directly selected
to accelerate the evolution of the most varied traits across generations by
driving sexed organisms to adapt faster to changing conditions. But the parallel
transmissions of endosymbiosis, bacterial sex and parthenogenesis (the
reproduction of an unfertilised egg into offspring) present as many genetic
variations as two-parent sex. The primacy of sexual reproduction in increasing
Abstract Sex
complexity is, then, undermined. Indeed, sexual reproduction itself can be
expected to have arisen from previous symbiotic associations, from parasitisms
and transgenic trades between distinct bacteria under certain pressures, and
bacterial symbiosis is thoroughly folded into the process of nucleic
transmission.
This leads to a conception of life as a ‘dissipative dynamics’, a nonteleological account of nature’s organisation. Margulis’ work on microbial sex
suggests that unprecedented reorganisations of life occur through symbiotic
trade, a non-cumulative mixing giving rise to new compositions that do not
resemble the parts from which they were generated. In endosymbiosis, novelty
does not imply the enrichment of matter; the rule of symbiotic life is chance
encounter – unforeseeable responses to unknowable conditions.
Abstract Sex
Your people will change. Your young will be more like us and ours more
like you. Your hierarchical tendencies will be modified and if we learn to
regenerate limbs and reshape our bodies, we’ll share that ability with you.
That’s part of the trade. We’re overdue for it.
Octavia E. Butler
The distance between the macro and the micro no longer applies to this world
of bacterial trade, proliferating through symbiotic contagion rather than nucleic
filiation. There are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, generating
an ecosystem of micro-mutations which intersect at different speeds. This
symbiosis, catalysed by chance encounters between molecular bodies, maps a
dynamics of evolution that resonates with the metaphysics of Deleuze, Guattari
and Spinoza.
For them, nature is machinic, an engineering process of paths never
becoming a whole. Life forms do not result from a forced, or spontaneous,
cooperation between individuated bodies struggling to reach a shared goal or
to survive in a hostile environment. They are defined neither by a harmonious
nor a conflictual state of nature driven by group collaboration or by individual
competition. Altruism and egoism are both rooted in a humanisation of
evolution that is undermined by symbiotic trade.
Instead, symbiotic assemblages make use of chance encounters that include
reverse abductions, viral transmission, nuclearisation and multiparasitism.
These processes of becoming are machinic involutions on a nature-culture
continuum. Unknowable mutations are entailed in all of the parts caught up
in their composition. I call these mutations abstract sex.
Abstract sex designates the potentials of intensive mutant matter –
potentials that require no teleological aim towards novelty. Abstract sex
. Octavia Butler, Dawn, New York: Warner Books, , p. .
I, Cyborg: Reinventing the Human
names neither a progressive nor a regressive state of materiality. Rather, it is
a conception of nature defined by continuous mutations across all layers and
stratifications. It is a non-deterministic process, a phylum of immanent relations
traversing traditional strata in a parallel, anti-genealogical dynamic. Abstract
sex opens up bio-physical and bio-cultural organisation of nucleic sex to
radical de-stratification.
Bacterial Micropolitics
It is the singular moment of Darwinism and social Darwinism, initially
triggered by the combination of social urbanisation and technological industrialisation, that must today give way to abstract sex. Together with this pairing
goes the entire theory of evolution that has become central at the biological,
social and economic layers, dominating, for example, psychology, sociology,
anthropology and political theory. The function of adaptation, the ‘survival of
the fittest’, can finally be disentangled from the social field, and the conspiracy
of culture to ‘make’ nature is ended.
In the Darwinian logic, the blind force of natural selection regulates
variations by ensuring common descent. This explains the driving force of
capitalist development: capitalism is the invisible hand of order that selects
the most successful mode of reproduction originating from the individual
struggle for survival. In neo-Darwinist Kevin Kelly’s famous analogy, the selforganisation of natural systems mirrors the increasing development of the free
market: self-organisation takes the place of natural selection, regulating and
channelling the world’s randomness into a working whole. This is ‘control
without control’ – an operation of selection that, for Kelly, does not involve
a hierarchical chain of command. Rather, the ‘invisible hand of selection’
controls, without authority, the networked architecture of natural and economic
systems. Biological networks match a democratic model of the market, defying
the transcendence of centralised control.
The determinism of evolutionary complexity, in which self-organising
networks add simple units to constitute complex systems, maintains a finality
for nature. Capitalism as Darwinian evolution requires repetition without
mutation, the passage from actuals to actuals, the preservation of the same
variation, the selection of an always already individuated difference. This logic
of ‘control without control’ only recentralises humanism in nature, a dynamic
process of teleological evolution that dismisses the vaster, more aimless
processes that, in fact, constitute them.
Of course, the continuous folding-in of indeterminate populations
and mutant bodies must ultimately confound the supposed primacy of
‘self-organisation’. Not only does abstract sex radically call into question the
biological determinism that takes determinate forms and functions as examples
for all organisations, but the fact of continuous symbiotic trade destroys Kelly’s
Abstract Sex
naturalist logic of economic systems and the unitary logic it imposes on the
population of genetic material. In abstract sex, potential mutations accompany
the most diverse stages of organisation on a nature-culture continuum, refuting
the use of biology as a model for laissez-faire, liberal economics.
The aimlessness of abstract sex also calls into question the ‘creative power
of the multitude’, theorised by Hardt and Negri in the book Empire. For them,
the multitude constitutes ‘the networked real productive force of our social
world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives off the vitality
of the multitude’. The multitude is defined by creative, communicative, networked relations of virtualised production (i.e. immaterial labour), based on the
decentralised, innovative and ‘abstract cooperation’ of bodies that constitutes
global capitalism. By considering Empire as a parasitical web of bodies living
off the creative vitality of a multitude, characterised by the networked
intelligence of humans and machines, Hardt and Negri still presume a formal
distinction between the self-enclosing or self-organising structure of capitalism,
on the one hand, and the cooperative, creative forces of the multitude on the
other. And, although they argue for the primary potentials of the multitude
over apparatuses of capture – state capitalism – their model recentralises human
agency in the material dynamics of evolution with creativity as the organic
force that will always resist parasitic capture.
Rather than engaging with molecular mutations, Hardt and Negri
characterise capitalism through the negative qualities of parasitism as opposed
to the striving, living qualities of the multitude. This reinstates vitalist creativity
and re-installs the human at the centre of matter’s dynamics. Empire misses the
dynamics of transmission visible in the endosymbiotic coexistence of bacterial
and nucleic, informational trading through markets and anti-markets. Abstract
sex demands a radically ambivalent picture of the relation between the host and
the guest, the abductor and the abductee, the parasite and that upon which it
is parasitic. If each symbiotic assemblage involves the modification of all parts
participating in its composition, unleashing the emergence of unpredictable
mutations, then apparatuses of capture can never be external to the multitude.
On the contrary, there is a constant, interdependent relationship between these
distinct modes of organisation. Hence, not only can the most rigid monopoly
feed on the sparsest grassroots, but counter-power can also hijack and grow
through power’s channels.
This open-ended trading entails no aim, interest or finality. It is a non-given
micropolitics of de-stratification and mutation: a pragmatics under construction
on the nature-culture plane. It concerns bodies defined by relations and potentials rather than the macropolitical determination of differences in position by
kind and degree. This micropolitics of bodies resonates with the ethics (or
. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, .
. Ibid, p. .
I, Cyborg: Reinventing the Human
ethology) of Spinoza, subtracting the body’s field of action from the humanist
logic of self-interest, whereby political activity requires the identification of
groups occupying visible social categories (e.g. class, race and gender).
Abstract sex instead offers a pragmatics of encounters, abductions and
contagions between bodies, laying out a dynamics of sociability that emerges
in situ rather than being determined by social positions. It entails a bodily
participation in pulling out potential threads of mutation from actual conditions
and distributing turbulent variations. Sex becomes an indeterminate quantum
of thought and extension, proliferating through the contagious trading
of matter, affecting – acting upon – the socio-cultural determination of
identity positions.
This practice of intensifying bodily potentials to act and become is an
affirmation of desire without lack which signals the non-climactic, aimless
circulation of bodies in a symbiotic assemblage. This desire is not to be equated
with something natural or given, spontaneous or induced. It is not primarily
intentional. It has no final peak. It exists in symbiotic compositions giving rise
to novel mutations. As a micropolitics, this continuous construction of nonclimactic assemblages entails indeterminate fields of action in which each local
activity modulates a global state. Very small interventions resonate unknowably
across the plane. These assemblages of bodies are as biological and cultural as
they are collective and political. It is the body that bears the potentials of action
and mutation, and abstract sex mobilises them, spinning off new symbionts
across the evolutionary logic of nature, economics and desire.