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Social Text, 80 (Volume 22, Number 3), Fall 2004, pp. 25-49 (Article)
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/soc/summary/v022/22.3parisi.html
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tials, which, as Henri Bergson argues, are real insofar as they defi ne the
inexhaustible heterogeneity of matter in its dynamics of actualization. 3
The virtual does not defi ne a set of possibilities or actualities, whose
forms and functions have already become visible. Quite the contrary, the
virtual only maps a field of potentials out of which actuals emerge. The
virtual is never completely actualized, and actuals are never completely
virtualized. Rather, the virtual-actual circuit entails a continual yet partial feedback between two mutual yet nonidentical planes of becoming.
There is no dualistic opposition between the virtual and the actual. All
dynamics entail a virtual-actual circuit of individuation, which is an open
process occurring in the middle: on the fi ssure or crack disclosing between
adjacent surfaces.
Drawing on Bergson’s notion of the virtual-actual, I want to reengineer the notion of feminine desire and move beyond the critical impasse
between biological essentialism and cultural constructivism. Although this
notion has historically been at the forefront of feminist cultural criticism,
my argument engages with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of
molecular desire, to highlight the micropolitical importance of the notions
of feminine desire and sex in cybernetic culture.
From this standpoint, feminine desire cannot cease to engage with the
micropolitics of “becoming-woman”: a crucial practice in the interruption of the economy of sex, which lays out the oedipalization of the body,
building on the biological order of sexual reproduction or the biological
stratification of sex.4 Feminine desire is not in women or in men but entails
a micropolitics of becoming, which is not quick to dismiss femininity as
a given essence or a cultural construction. Questioning the metaphysical
teleology of nature also entails challenging the metaphysical tradition of
essence in which matter remains inert, animated by a form or essence. In
critical studies, such a challenge has corresponded to a cultural intervention, in which matter is created by human culture—the extrinsic mediator
that makes matter readable or interpretable through signification. This
article instead intervenes against the metaphysics of essence by engaging
with Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract materialism, in which matter lays
out a virtual-actual process of individuation, a continual modification of
particles-forces without linear descent. For abstract materialism, there are
only bodies in motion enveloped in dynamics of transmission out of which
distinct phases of material order arise. These dynamics above all include
the collision of bodies in movement rather than their states of equilibrium,
and virtual or potential emergences rather than possible outcomes.
In this sense, this article links feminine desire to virtual matter. The
notion of feminine desire is not to be confused with feminine forms and
functions, with the realm of the possible, which has already been calcu-
26
Luciana Parisi
lated. Quite the contrary, feminine desire here entails the heterogeneity
of preindividual potentials tending toward actualizations in the most
unpredictable fashion. Actualizations are emergences spilling out from the
indeterminate yet differentiated potentials of matter. Yet I am not drawing
an analogy between feminine desire and virtual matter. I am arguing that
feminine desire, far from being an essence or a human construction, is
entangled with virtual and actual dynamics of the organization of matter,
which do not cease to emerge without unleashing new potential mutations.
In other words, feminine desire is plunged in a virtual-actual field of relations, out of which the micropolitics of bodies constitutes distinct levels
of material order. Thus I suggest that feminine desire has to be related to
potential mutations rather than to identity so as to build up a micropolitics
of difference, which is not based on determinantal positions (sex-gender
analogy), but on emergences that encompass the biological, cultural,
technological orders of matter.
The reengineering of the notion of feminine desire also entails a reconstruction of the notion of sex, which, far from determining an essence,
entails nonlinear transmission of virtual potentials, operating by means
of contagion rather than fi liation. With abstract materialism, the notion of
sex involves a reconceptualization of the modes of transmission that have
associated sex with fi liative heredity or sexual reproduction, and sexual
organs. In short, sex needs to be disentangled from the Darwinian and
neo-Darwinian models of evolution that have contributed to reducing the
notion of sex to sexual organs, genital transmission, and fi liative genetic
transfer. This article instead argues that the notion of sex has to be related
to contagious transmission, which is explained by microbiologist Lynn
Margulis’s theory of endosymbiosis, or SET (serial endosymbiotic theory).
This theory has challenged the classical evolutionary understanding of
heredity and transmission, using the work of the Russian scholar-biologist
Konstantin S. Mereschovsky, who, in the fi rst quarter of the twentieth
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.5 A
“guest” bacteria entering the cell takes part in a transfer of DNA information with the “host” bacteria already present. Dismissed for a long time,
symbiogenesis has now acquired a constitutive scientific importance,
supported by molecular biology and biochemistry’s questioning of the
classical division between the plant and animal kingdoms and the classifications based on this division. Bacteria are cells without a bounded
membrane nucleus that transfer information across phyla without regard
for such distinctions, altering the genetic material of each lineage as they
go through. These symbiotic processes, which now in fact seem to explain
Information and Symbiotic Micropolitics
27
the unpredictable emergence of the cellular and genetic modifications of
sex and reproduction, are ignored by Darwinism and neo-Darwinism. As
I show, endosymbiosis challenges the model of evolution based on linear
transmission and demonstrates that each animal cell is the unexpected
result of long symbiotic contagions between bacteria.
Nonfi liative processes of transmission expose new implications for the
cybernetic folding of technology, nature, and feminine desire. In particular,
genetic engineering, from transgenesis (the transfer of genetic material
across species barriers; for example, the insertion of pig genes in human
cells to improve cell transplants) to human cloning, challenges the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian notion of evolution based on the organic model of
sex—the sexual reproduction of the best-adapted variations.
As opposed to these models of evolution, I favor Margulis’s symbiotic
transmission. Rather than starting from a simple unity that engenders
complexity, endosymbiosis lays out heterogeneous contagions generating
new cellular and multicellular modifications of transmission in the most
unpredictable fashion. Endosymbiosis highlights processes of emergences
and modifications resonating with Bergson’s critique of the Darwinian
notion of natural selection: the blind force that selects already actualized
bodies without accounting for their virtual potentials. Endosymbiosis lays
out the virtual-actual circuit of differentiation in which new modes of
transmission are not determinate by the selection of gradual accumulation
and random mutations but emerge from nonlinear transfers or molecular
contagions between bodies under certain pressures. As discussed here,
selective pressures, far from providing the conservation of the fittest traits
or units, mark an open-ended communication between the body and its
environment: an ecology of mutual modifications in which a body responds
to selection in the most unpredictable way.
My approach to evolution and, in particular, to dynamics of transmission also resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of machinic nature.6
Nature in this notion is determinate by neither subjects nor objects. It is
above all about nonlinear relations, open-ended connections of partially
actualized bodies encompassing distinct levels of organization (biological, cultural, technological). They name this nature “rhizome” insofar as
it lays out the engineering of parts that never add up to a whole but enter
new partial relations without being able to trace back the line of descent.
Thus machinic entails a mutual yet nonlinear feedback between bodies,
which emerges in the middle of bodies, in a process of composition and
decomposition of bodies. Indeed, a body never corresponds to a unity, a
whole, an organism, or a system. Quite the contrary, a body emerges from
processes of individuation: the body emerges from preindividual particles
in continual collision. In this sense, bodies are never completely actualized
28
Luciana Parisi
but occupy regions in between the virtual and the actual worlds. Machinic
nature defi nes such regions of engineering bodies out of which distinct
levels of order emerge: biological, cultural, technological, and so on. In
other words, machinic nature maps the mutual relations between all kinds
of partial bodies laying out the virtual potentials of matter (continual
variation). Machinic nature only coincides with assemblages that cut
across lineages and fi liative heredity without ceasing to affi rm the aimless
mutations of nature.
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic nature, I want to point
to the virtual tendencies of sex (the potentials of contagious transmission) emerging from what I call the “biodigital symbiosis of matter.” In
this instance, sex does not correspond to the biological and cultural forms
or technical functions of the organism (sex-gender identity). More precisely, the latter defi ne the resonating determinants of a vaster process of
transmission from which they arise. This process requires a notion of sex
abstract enough to catch the amodal or virtual links between the phase
spaces of nature: from unicellular to multicellular bodies, from the biological body to the body of culture. As I show, this notion of abstract sex thus
entails processes of contagious transmission mapping the emergence of
virtual potentials at each actualization.
For feminist cultural criticism, the notion of machinic nature may
contribute to reproblematizing the binarism of embodiment and disembodiment, nature and culture, sex and gender that has accompanied recent
debates in cyberculture and cyberfeminism.7 In particular, the engagement with a nongenealogical model of evolution, far from identifying sex
with genitality or the biological function of coupling and fi liation, opens
up the materiality of sex onto contagious dynamics of transmission. These
dynamics may suggest a new critical approach to the politics of a body or
a third way out of the impasse between the essentialist (the world of the
given) and the constructivist (the world of culture) conceptions of nature
that have shaped recent debates about information sciences and technologies. In other words, it may contribute to extending the politics of desire
on a nature-culture continuum by generating a new understanding of the
changing conditions of power in bioinformatic capitalism. 8
Thus machinic nature may help readdress the relation between technology and desire beyond the logic of analogy and similitude of technology
and women, the female body and biological nature. This logic fails to map
the processual relation between terms that are never completely fi nite. It
confuses the zone in-between, the passage or movement of all elements and
particles participating in a relation, with the properties, types, and functions resulting from a process of formation. In this sense, this logic cannot
account for the differential process of becoming of nature and culture; the
Information and Symbiotic Micropolitics
29
social and the technological whose determinate forms are always its partial
result (partial intensive extensities). In other words, this logic dismisses
the abstract (a multiplicity of potentials) dynamics of formation—the
transitional modification of a body-sex beyond its given essence.
Quite the contrary, machinic nature lays out a plane of strange attraction (nonlinear relation) between distinct dynamics of molecular femininity that challenges the biological and cultural economy of sexual reproduction and binary sex. This molecular femininity is neither given nor
constructed. It is virtual and actual—real and emergent, indeterminate and
varying. It does not match with the realm of the possible (already determinate sexual difference) or with the realization of the real (the deployment or
extension of an a priori form—transcendent femininity). Rather, molecular
femininity coincides with its potentials (heterogeneous modifications).
Molecular femininity suggests a new parallel level of engagement with
body politics moving beneath the representation of sex-gender yet across
the increasing molecularization (computation) of the body in bioinformatic capitalism (from the Human Genome Project to human cloning).9
From this standpoint, I argue that the impact of information sciences
and technology implies a new politics (a micropolitics) of the body that
involves a materialist construction of sex.10 This construction will enable
us to grasp amodal dynamics of transmission that locate femininity onto a
vaster process of transmission linking the variations of a body on a natureculture continuum.
Schizogenesis
By mapping a third critical route away from the impasse between biological essentialism and discursive constructivism, I argue for a nonteleological notion of nature, challenging models of evolution that defi ne the
biological understanding of the body, sex, and reproduction according to
the arborescent logic of inheritance. In particular, Darwinism—and to
some extent neo-Darwinism—implies a fi liative model of the body based
on the binary logic of sexual exchange.
According to Darwin, natural selection is the principle by which each
slight variation is preserved through heredity to benefit the individual’s
adaptation to an ever-changing environment.11 Darwin’s model of evolution had challenged the creationist idea of the universe, by insisting that
populations develop through a gradual accumulation of variations specifically selected through their relations with the environment. In other
words, all species existing in the world have not always been the same
but are the result of slow changes subjected to the regulatory function
30
Luciana Parisi
of natural selection. Natural selection regulates variations by ensuring
common descent.12
August Weismann’s model of heredity transmission contributes to
defi ne common descent through the function of sexual reproduction.13
The inheritance of the germplasm through sexual coupling enables the
preservation of variations in a species. His theory, famously summarized
as “the Weismann Barrier,” argues that only the germline (the nucleic or
chromosomal DNA of the cell) guarantees direct fi liation. Indeed, germ
material is passed intact from parents to offspring. The barrier points to a
noncommunicative relation between germinal material (nucleic material of
the cell) and somatic material (nonnucleic material residing in the body of
the cell), in which only germ cells carry out the function of heredity transmission. The soma is merely instructed by germinal material to express
the hereditary traits, but itself cannot transmit information. The somatic
parts of the animal cell lack vital genetic material. They have discrete life
spans and die. Thus germinal transmission ensures the inheritance of life
beyond somatic death. In other words, the sexual reproduction of living
substance surpasses its cellular destiny, which is to die.
This model of evolution is also central to Freud’s libidinal economy
of life, which explains how erotic impulses ward off the regression toward
inorganic death. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1929), Freud hypothesizes that sexual reproduction counterbalances living organisms’ tendency
to die by transmitting germinal life. In his articulation, sexual instincts (or
eros), also defi ned as the “preserver of all things” or as “life instinct,” aim
at the coalescence of portions of living substance. The sexual inheritance
of germ cells explains the notion of libido as a self-preservative instinct,
or narcissistic eros, extended to individual cells.14
Like Darwin, Freud considers evolution in terms of a tendency toward
disorder. Sexual reproduction has the regulatory function of preserving
and rejuvenating variations by counterbalancing the drive toward the
inorganic (disorganization), less differentiated, fi nite soma. This return
to equilibrium requires a discharging of excessive energy. Pleasure is this
discharging of excitation: the channeling of accumulated internal tension
toward the outside. This libidinal economy of evolution is embedded in the
cyclic return of death into life, marked by a principle of constancy. In other
words, the discharge of variations through sexual reproduction. According to Freud, this thermodynamic equilibrium ensures the regeneration
of organic life.15 For Freud as for Darwin, the evolution of the organism
is regulated by the aim to discharge in order to charge again, the purpose
to reproduce life beyond the tendency to die.
In Creative Evolution (1983), Bergson argues against this entropic
model of evolution insofar as it tries to derive life from preexisting indi-
Information and Symbiotic Micropolitics
31
vidual parts. Life is not an accumulation of actualized variations. The
latter emerge through a process of differentiation between particle flows
moving in inverse direction—that is, variations result from the elastic tension between the élan vital and matter.16 As Bergson argues:
While, in its contact with matter, life is comparable to an impulsion or impetus,
regarded in itself it is an immensity of potentiality, a mutual encroachment of
thousands and thousands of tendencies which nevertheless are “thousands
and thousands” only when regarded as outside of each other, that is, when
spatialized. Matter divides what it is, and what does not cease to be a “virtual
multiplicity.”17
In this view, rather than a passage from actual to actual, the transmission
of variations involves the emergence of something new. Bergson introduces indetermination in matter: virtually present forces entering into a
new actual relation through chance encounters. Virtuality in matter does
not have to be opposed to real matter. The virtual is not opposed to the
real but to the possible. The latter defi nes the realm of predictability: the
expected results deriving from one cause. The virtual, on the contrary, is
the real: the realm of pure potentials. In this sense, the virtual needs to be
related to the actual insofar as the virtual gives something different to the
actual that it generates by always enveloping the potential for something
else than the actual. Thus evolution can no longer be thought without the
unexpected emergence of potential variations, without the heterogeneous
production of actual forms of life that do not cease to actualize without
unleashing new potentials. Evolution does not entail the passage from
actuals to actuals—from the possible to the possible—but it can only be
conceived as a movement of individuation of the virtual tending toward
the actual; heterogeneous potentials tending toward heterogeneous formations. Thus variations emerge as an actualization of a virtual multiplicity:
a sudden stoppage of running flows (élan vital) whose potential surpasses
individuated actuals. In this sense, the transmission of life entails the
passage of virtual and not only actual energy. This passage of qualitative
variations zigzags across planes of actualization through infi nite splittings
and divisions.
Bergson suggests that the internal principle of germinal life is not at
all the result of selection from purely contingent variations. This principle
involves the continual self-modification of a genetic energy whose potential
is indeterminable. Such a continuum resides in the intuitive perception of
time as duration (5). The past is not in the past and the future is not in the
advent of that which is to come. Duration defi nes the coexistence of the
past with the future through a passing present: a transductive (transitua-
32
Luciana Parisi
tional) time. Similarly, according to Bergson, evolution does not proceed
through the gradual cumulation of substances summing up to a whole.
“Evolution requires a real continuity of the past in the present,” where the
past is something that endures in itself and is actualized through maximally
divergent lines (5). This implies a qualitative differentiation of time rather
than the juxtaposition of segments of time or the inheritance of the past
through a frozen present (linear heredity) (26).
As Bergson observes, Darwinism is unable to defi ne novelty in evolution (such as the emergence of new species) because it does not explain
movement in itself: movement as motor of nonpossible—or already actualized—but potential variation. For Bergson, the energetic conception
of motion as merely stemming from a point or source of contact—a
leveler—needs to be replaced by another conception of movement as an
action of nonpunctual particles, particles that are without an anchoring
center and yet ceaselessly move, passing and traversing singular phases,
expanding through thousands of tendencies (258).
Bergson argues that natural selection is inadequate because all it
requires is an actualized organism’s adaptation to an external environment (169). But, he suggests, adaptation is not an effort to add new traits.
Adaptation entails a potential modification of the body, that is, a virtual
action as opposed to a passive accommodation. The body replies to selective pressures by changing its field of action. It invents new internal regions
of reception that are resonances of an outside in which they are, as it were,
in permanent metastable communication. Internal resonances do not
represent a genuine interiority or internal will of the individual body. The
invention of internal regions merely deploys a transduction of information
between milieus, a process that takes place on the porous membranes of a
body. As Gilbert Simondon argues: “The living being can be considered
to be a node of information that is being transmitted inside itself—it is a
system within a system, containing within itself a mediation between two
different orders of magnitude.”18
In this sense, variations are not actualities accumulated and transmitted through sexual reproduction. On the contrary, as recent theories of
evolution that embrace the molecular dynamics of organization argue,
variations emerge through the parallel networks between populations
and territories poised at the edge of a phase transition from one state to
another.19 Selection does not impose an order of fitness on these networked
relations. Rather, it is immanent to their regulatory circuits because it acts
at their differential degrees of complexity. 20 From the standpoint of virtual
evolution, sexual reproduction coincides with a phase of organization of
cellular and genetic architectures. These latter deploy processes of parallel communication: the network relations between the germline and the
Information and Symbiotic Micropolitics
33
somaline, nucleic and nonnucleic transmission. Parallel dynamics of communication and transmission of information in molecular biology have also
been at the core of the endosymbiotic theory of evolution reelaborated by
Margulis in the 1970s. In particular, as I show, the endosymbiotic understanding of evolution highlights the unexpected emergence of variations,
which resonates with Bergson’s notion of evolution: the virtual plane of
actual bodies out of which heterogeneous variations emerge.
Studying the composition of the egg cell, Margulis argued that it is
bacteria (nonnucleated cells), not naked strings of genes, that reside in
the somatic body of eukaryotic cells (cells without a membrane-bounded
nucleus) in animals and plants. 21 Her study of bacterial and mitochondrial
transmission questioned the entire logic of Darwinism and neo-Darwinism.
Mitochondria, or bacterial organelles—occupying the somatic body of the
egg cell—have an independent genetic apparatus (DNA, messenger RNA,
and ribosomes), enclosed in mitochondrial membranes. Like all bacteria,
mitochondria transmit information in a radically different way from the
germinal or chromosomal material enclosed in the nucleus of the cell.
While nucleic cells undergo chromosomal fertilization—the fusion of haploid or halved nucleic material XX and XY—and division, mitochondria
replicate much like bacterial cells. When they get too large, they undergo
fi ssion. Of course, the mitochondria must fi rst replicate their DNA, which
is circular and in its basic structure resembles that of a bacterium.
Challenging Weismann’s barrier, at the core of the Darwinian and
neo-Darwinian model of transmission in evolution, Margulis’s study of
the egg cell pointed out that the somatic body of the cell, far from being
destined to die, is able to transmit information across generations. However, according to Margulis, the transmission of mitochondria, which
only takes place by way of the mother (through the egg cell), suggests that
mitochondria were once autonomous bacteria (purple bacteria) captured
within the somatic body—instead of outside the nucleus—of eukaryotic
cells, possibly during the “oxygen revolution” 2,000 million years ago. 22
Thus the somatic body of the cell does not defi ne life’s tendency to regress
toward less differentiated inorganic matter: the death drive, for Freud.
Rather, it exposes a parallel process of transmission (the nucleic germline,
and the bacterial somaline), which questions linear transmission in evolution, defi ned by the accumulation and discharge of genetic variations: the
germinal reproduction of life through somatic death. Not only does nucleic
transmission on its own not determine the increasing complexity of the
species; but nucleic DNA itself is altered by the mitochondrial material
surrounding it. In other words, what we now know is that there are two
parallel and mutually infecting channels of genetic communication that
34
Luciana Parisi
determine the unpredictable emergence of mutations across and within
species.
Endosymbiosis challenges the Darwinian and Freudian economy of
evolution centered on the difference between simple and complex, homogeneous and heterogeneous, death and life, inorganic and organic. This
difference based on the germinal or nucleic function of information transmission through sexual reproduction is believed to ensure the gradual
complexification of the species—the accumulation and discharge of variations enabling the overcoming of somatic death or the regression toward
inorganic and simpler levels of matter. Endosymbiosis exposes a parallel
process of transmission previously all but unknown to science and thus
unaccounted from within the dominant paradigms of Darwinism and neoDarwinism. It is thus not a question of organic and inorganic, simple and
complex, life and death, progression and regression. Rather, as Margulis
argues, it is about endosymbiotic modifications pointing to the unpredictable emergence of mutations.
Endosymbiosis argues that the classical evolutionary understanding of
the development of life, based on differences of degree (increasing complexity) and types (species) and on random mutation (Darwin’s theory
of natural selection), dismisses the symbiotic processes of inheritance
that explain the continual modifications of cellular and genetic transmission. Endosymbiosis challenges the “zoocentrism” of the theories of
evolution (based on linear evolution from the simple to the complex) and
demonstrates that “each animal cell is, in fact, an uncanny assembly, the
evolutionary merger of distinct bacterial metabolisms.”23
For endosymbiosis, bacteria (i.e., cells without a membrane-bounded
nucleus) defi ne the dynamics of transmission in evolution through the viral
trading of genetic information. Although not undifferentiated, bacteria
are not species-classified organisms that breed among themselves and
reproduce through mating. Bacteria are colonies of unicellular bodies that
send genes by a simple contact, thus transferring and receiving information across phyla without regard for species distinctions, reengineering the
genetic material of each lineage as they go through. Thus nucleic transmission at the core of the eukaryotic realm of metazoa (plants, animals,
and humans) does not defi ne the complexification of life. According to
Margulis, eukaryotes (cells with a membrane-bounded nucleus) are the
unexpected result of the long symbiotic parasitism between distinct bacteria, among which mitochondria, under certain pressures, became their
permanent hosts. Nucleic transmission, therefore, far from exemplifying
complexification, is a modification of bacterial communication. However,
while the eukaryotes reproduce by sexual coupling that involves both
Information and Symbiotic Micropolitics
While the
eukaryotes
reproduce
by sexual
coupling that
involves both
nucleic and
mitochondrial
transmission,
bacteria trade
information
in an open
communication
system bypassing genetic
speciation.
35
nucleic and mitochondrial transmission, bacteria trade information in an
open communication system bypassing genetic speciation.
From this standpoint, it can be argued that Margulis’s notion of
evolution does not map a tendency toward disorder but a heterogeneous
process that envelops distinct modes of transmission assembling together
by responding to selective pressures in the most unpredictable way. Yet it
is important to highlight that symbiotic assemblages are not to be confused
with the addition of parts: the summing up of already actualized bodies to
form a new whole. Rather, symbiosis points to the potential emergence of
new compositions that do not resemble each of the parts from which they
were generated. For endosymbiosis, novelty in evolution is not determinate
by gradual accumulation, random mutation, and genetic fi liation aiming
to enrich or complexify matter. Rather, novelty is defi ned by prolonged
symbiotic merging of distinct bodies, in which the nonlinear transmission
between the host and the guest lays bare the emergence of virtual potentials. Virtual potentials thus map a heterogeneous process of transmission,
in which matter, far from being enriched or simplified, becomes a plane
of continual variations without ultimate aim.
A far cry from progressive evolution, endosymbiosis maps the unexpected variations of sex in terms of these bacterial trades. For neoDarwinism, sexual reproduction—or nucleic transmission—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. 24 For endosymbiosis, bacterial sex and parthenogenesis (the reproduction of an unfertilized egg into offspring) present as many genetic
variations as two-parent sex. Sexual reproduction is not the ultimate model
of transmission, selected to ensure organic complexity. Rather, it is a symbiotic modification of bacterial transmission emerging from a nonfi liative
trade between distinct bacteria under certain pressures.
Similarly, endosymbiosis clarifies the relation between the biological
and the technological by engaging with the symbiotic link between distinct
levels of material order, bypassing the logic of evolution of the simple and
the complex, the progressive and the regressive, the organic and inorganic.
This logic is at the core of the customary understanding of technology
and biology, which are reduced to two essentially different, opposed, and
individuated forms devoid of any common plane of virtuality. This understanding implies that biology can only be added to technology and vice
versa without considering their symbiotic processes of organization, out
of which these forms emerge.
From this standpoint, as Margulis and Sagan point out, biotechnologies, such as genetic engineering, are not to be considered as innovative
complexifications of life. Bacteria invented these sex modes of engineer-
36
Luciana Parisi
ing transmission 3,900 million years ago. Genetic engineering takes as
its model the trading of genes across bacterial bodies that use viruses as
vectors. This recombination of genetic material between independent cellular bodies marks the reemergence of the most ancient sex: bacterial sex.
Since the lower Precambrian times, bacteria have traded genes across the
most divergent lineages. Biotech opens a new channel for bacterial trading,
but what is transmitted across the channel will not reliably conform to the
possible outcomes programmed by science.
Biotechnologies, such as transgenesis, also entail the horizontal transfer of genetic material, the reengineering of cells across species barriers to
improve organs and cell transplants, to make insulin, and to produce new
cells and tissues for “cell therapies.”25 This nonfi liative recombination of
genetic sequences and cellular compounds favors the emergence of new
viruses that have come to defi ne new generations of mutant vegetables,
insects, fi shes, reptiles, sheep, and humans. Transgenesis accelerates differential mutations in patterns of evolution that exceed differences in kind
and degree between species as well as within the same species.
Cloning also challenges Weismann and Freud’s libidinal economy of
life (the barrier between the germline and the somaline). In particular,
mammal cloning suggests that the somatic material contained in the
cell outside the nucleus is not destined to die but is itself transmissible. 26
According to the central belief in evolutionary dynamics and embryology,
nucleic DNA—the germline—is considered to be the true organizer 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. Thus the putative organizing function of life attributed to DNA—the germline—results in a mere
induction, whose nature is a matter of indifference. 27 It is not nucleic DNA
that determines variation. The latter emerges from an immanent relation
between the germline—the arrow of time for Darwin and Freud—and the
somaline—the inorganic or regressive line of death: that is, the capacity
of the body of the cell, the inorganic somatic body, to feed back on the
germline. This relation points to the nonlinear circuits of reversible causality whereby actual variations act back or affect the virtual potentials of a
body. Thus it is no longer a question of either regressive or inorganic line
of death and progressive or organic line of life. Death and life no longer
can be thought in terms of simple and complex matter. On the contrary,
with endosymbiosis, death does not cease happening in every becoming. It
defi nes an intensive movement of matter: continual mutations rather than
ultimate points of discharge.
Information and Symbiotic Micropolitics
37
Biodigital Sex
Biotech thus points to a symbiotic relation between the biological and
the technological: a biodigital assemblage of matter out of which unprecedented modes of transmission unleash virtual, indeterminate potentials.
Endosymbiotic assemblages indeed suggest that the distance between the
macro (complex) and the micro (simple) no longer applies to this world
of molecular sexes proliferating through contagious transmission rather
than germinal fi liation. If we take into account the bacterial dynamics of
transmission discussed by Margulis, then we start to realize that there
are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, sexes generating an
ecosystem of molecular transfer between the most distinct bodies. This
symbiosis does not simply indicate the passage from one actualized body
or system to another—the transfer from one individual to another. Rather,
it lays out a dynamics of individuation in which actuals are not related
to other actuals but are primarily entangled to virtual potentials. In this
sense, symbiosis maps the virtual tendencies of sex—the emergence of
indeterminate potentials in all modes of transmission—catalyzed by the
contagious encounters between molecular bodies. Symbiosis maps virtual potentials in transmission on a machinic plane of nature defi ned by
Deleuze and Guattari’s destratification and Baruch Spinoza’s ethics.
On the machinic plane of nature, it is not merely a question of biotechnologies imitating bacterial sex, somatic transmission, or endosymbiotic
mergers of bodies: a mouse and a microchip, a virus and a human organism. The biodigital assemblage of bodies entails an intensive propagation
(i.e., a variation in the capacity of distribution) of symbiotic transmission:
the acceleration of unexpected or turbulent swerves in nonlinear transfers
that exposes the virtual or potential tendencies of sex. These tendencies
do not correspond to programmed possibilities but to unexpected mutations, which, as I show, defi ne the continuous destratification of matter,
as argued by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia.
Biotechnologies such as transgenesis and cloning catch the reverse
causality of parallel networks of transmission that, far from increasing the
complexity of individuated variations, speed up micromutations within and
across species. Biotechnologies do not defi ne progress in the evolution of
life aiming to increase complexity in order to escape from the return toward
death and inorganic or simpler matter. Rather, with endosymbiosis we
can argue that biotechnologies accelerate the molecular rates of mutation
insofar as they catalyze the bacterial transmission of information within
and across species (human, animals, and plants). Yet this acceleration
38
Luciana Parisi
does not suggest the accomplishment of a natural design, which ensures
the complexification of life through the overcoming of death.
The virtual tendencies of biodigital sex—that is, the symbiotic assemblage of the biological and technological levels of information transfer—
feed neither back nor forward in time. Rather, this modification indicates
a transition: a continual variation between distinct phases such as the biological and the technological orders of matter. This transition points to
a transductive (or a continual variation) of time: a present futurity (the
action of the present on the past, and of the past on the future on a machinic
plane of nature), according to which the biodigital sex feeds back on the
biological order of matter, which in turn unleashes indeterminate potentials
of transmission across the technological order in the future.
This symbiotic modification—that is, the biodigital assemblage—is
not part of a natural design, in which new dimensions are added to a
simpler matter. Symbiotic mutations are not the end result of previous
parasitic relations: the possible outcomes of already actualized forms and
functions of transmission. Symbiotic assemblages are not induced by a
forced or spontaneous cooperation between individuated bodies to reach
a shared goal or to survive in a hostile environment. These mutations
defi ne neither a harmonious nor a confl ictual state of nature driven by
group collaboration or individual competition—altruism and egoism both
being rooted in the humanization of evolution. Symbiosis involves chance
encounters opened up to potential abductions, viral infection, nuclearization, and multiparasitism between bodies out of which unprecedented compositions emerge. These are processes of becoming or machinic involutions
on a nature-culture continuum. They entail the mutation of all the parts
caught up in a composition. I call these potential mutations, occurring
in all dynamics of contagious transfer across linear time, abstract sex. In
this sense, abstract sex does not coincide with a specific level or time of
transmission, but it catches the virtual potentials accompanying singular
modes of transmission and therefore exposes an indeterminate multiplicity,
which is never assimilated in actualization. In other words, abstract sex
designates a mutant plane that envelops and is enveloped by all modes of
transmission operating by means of contagious proliferation rather than
fi liative sexual reproduction.
Abstract sex challenges the germinal or organic model of sexual
reproduction. Although I do not have time to demonstrate it here, it is
important to say that abstract sex is not synonymous with Bergson’s élan
vital understood as the differential complexification of matter. 28 Abstract
sex designates virtual potentials that are not enclosed in themselves but
are asymmetrically adjacent to every point in the actual world: intensive
Information and Symbiotic Micropolitics
39
mutant matter. Abstract sex does not coincide with neovitalist evolutionism, with nature understood as boundless creative complexification.
Abstract sex requires no teleological aim toward novelty. It names neither a
progressive nor a regressive state of materiality. Rather, it entails a machinic
conception of nature: the symbiotic composition and decomposition of
bodies defi ning a variation in their intensive and extensive capacity for
becoming (differential degrees of mutation of matter).
This machinic nature points to a crucial distinction between stratification (the plane of organization) and destratification (the plane of
immanence or becoming). Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of organization does not start from unity and integration but from heterogeneous
dynamics of change coinciding with a geologic model that encompasses all
levels of material orders: from the biological to the technical. These dynamics include sedimentation processes, web-layer formations, and limit points,
and thresholds of change, zones of sensitivity, and knot points of reversibility. Stratification is always adjacent to the phylum of destratification
defi ned by potential lines of mutation that are primary and coexistent to the
constitution of all structures, architectures, and anchors of equilibrium on
the strata. Strata therefore are not separate from phyla of destratification.
If it were so, we would reinsert dualism in matter, difference in kind and
degree, linear complexification, and regression toward inorganic simpler
matter. Rather, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, these processes defi ne a
multiplicity of folds of the same fabric.
Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “reverse causality or advanced determinism” defi nes the open dynamics of organization or stratification. 29
Stratic formations are dissipative and far from equilibrium systems. In
other words, they are defi ned by the networked dynamics of open organization marked by bifurcation points at which systems fl ip between one
region of phase space and another (bifurcators thus defi ne trigger points
when a system changes patterns). As opposed to closed systems, based on
the principle of constant equilibrium, a homeostatic cycle of charge and
discharge, strata are marked by temporary points of equilibrium partaking of a vaster web of organization regulated by attractors, vectors, zones
of sensitivity that link one strata to another. From the point of view of the
strata, sexual reproduction is not merely a biological given used as a source
for the cultural construction of gender through scientific knowledge. 30
Rather, it can be argued that sexual reproduction is a stratic formation
marking a threshold of change between the biophysical (the bacterial
organization of nucleic cells out of which nucleic transmission emerges and
distributes through sexual reproduction) and biocultural (the social organization of sex according to biological copulation) stratification of sex. 31
Yet this quasi-deterministic process of organization does not exhaust the
40
Luciana Parisi
dynamics of materiality. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, there is another,
nondeterministic process that constitutes a phylum of immanent relations
traversing strata, as well as layers within the same stratum. 32 This is the
process of destratification consisting of a phylum of intensive links falling
outside, or in the cracks between, the strata. This phylum lays out the
autonomy of indeterminate yet differential potentials from the strata that
themselves actualize. It suggests that virtual potentials are never completely actualized. The virtual is partially siphoned into the actual but in
doing so the process itself kick-starts a revirtualization of the actual: the
reemergence of a turbulent swerve away from equilibrium.
Abstract sex maps the parallel dynamics of destratification or becoming of virtual matter. In this sense, the biodigital assemblage implies neither the complexification of nor the return to bacterial sex. Theories of
complexity, indeed, risk reintroducing teleology in nature by highlighting
the boundless creativity of reproductive life—either confi rmed by sexual
reproduction or by the self-replicating genes—aiming to enrich matter.
Theories of complexity still distinguish unicellular from multicellular
levels of organization according to the gradual scale of the simple and the
complex, inorganic and organic, death and life. On the contrary, endosymbiosis helps us break away from teleological nature by mapping an
antigenealogical emergence of mutations, which follow no natural design.
Such an antigenealogy involves a contagious trading between singular
compositions of bodies forming nonfi liative packs able to produce their
own lines of invention (i.e., symbiotic modifications). From this standpoint, I argue that information trading or contagion implies no aim in
nature. This trading precedes and exceeds the patterns of transmission
governed by a transcendent principle of fi liative reproduction.
Information trading entails the contagious propagation of variations
not regulated by sexual exchange, copulation, and fi liative inheritance of the
same. Trading opens up sex to symbiotic assemblages laying out a micropolitical field of contagious relations between the most diverse bodies on a
nature-culture continuum. 33 This micropolitics shatters the evolutionary
model of sex determining the biological function of gender. In this sense,
Darwinian and neo-Darwinian models of evolution predicated on the
selection of sexual reproduction as the best-adapted mode of transmission that ensures variations across species needs to give in to a nonfi liative dynamics of information transfer, an a-organic sex opened up to the
emergence of virtual potentials. In other words, the sex-gender system of
identification based on the function of mating or sexed organisms reduces
the notions of inheritance and transmission to a purposive notion of nature,
defi ned by progressive and regressive movements, organic and inorganic
matter, life and death drives. To challenge such a notion without dismissing
Information and Symbiotic Micropolitics
41
material dynamics of organization and mutation, I argue that the notion
of sex has to be reengineered as involving contagious transmission. Thus
this notion of sex has to be abstract enough to catch the virtually present
forces of all actual modes of information transfer (from the biological to
the technological level). In this sense, sex is plunged into processes of
contagious transmission that are nonlinear, nonfi liative, nongenital. The
introduction of indeterminate potentials in matter thus involves a notion
of sex that maps, as I show, nonclimactic distributions of particles rather
than reiterating the pleasure of discharge.
Symbiotic Micropolitics
The impact of molecular sciences and technologies of information points
to a process of information transmission, in which the body can no longer be thought according to the critical impasse between given essentialism and cultural constructivism. Drawing on such an impact, this
article suggests that the body is neither animated by an internal essence
nor externally inscribed by the signifier. Borrowing from Deleuze and
Guattari’s abstract materialism, I argue that the body coincides with
its virtual or indeterminate potentials emerging from its actualizations.
The latter are not to be confused with the fi nal outcome of virtuality. On
the contrary, the virtual precedes and exceeds actuals, which are never
completely exhausted but always plunged in dynamic processes. In short,
they are always under construction. This virtual-actual circuit of a body
entails a notion of transmission that challenges the model of evolution
based on units of selection—the organism or the gene—favoring gradual
accumulation of variations and random mutations transmitted through
sexual reproduction: the fi liative passage of information. The Darwinian
and neo-Darwinian models of evolution suggest a purposive notion of
nature tending toward increasing complexity leaving behind less efficient,
less adapted, and simpler forms of life. The gradual scale of complexity
between the simple and the complex, the inorganic and the organic, death
and life involves starting from small parts that organize into a whole—
creating the apparatus of self-reproduction. On the contrary, I argue the
process of individuation has to be related to the endosymbiotic dynamics
of parasitism and contagion, which are ecologies of information trading
suggesting that a body, far from being completed, is suspended in a field
of virtual partialities.
Endosymbiosis provides an understanding of transmission beyond
sexual reproduction and beyond the gradual difference between the simple
(bacterial, or unicellular) body and the complex (eukaryotic, or multicel-
42
Luciana Parisi
lular) body. Symbiotic transmission suggests that a body does not correspond to actual forms and functions but is open to its potential contagions
arising from the indeterminate transfer between molecular bodies. Such a
transfer between hosts and guests cutting across lineages suggests a notion
of contagious sex that refutes the libidinal logic of fi liation. Contagious
sex—or transmission—enables us to map the open-ended potentials of a
body, by affi rming, together with Spinoza, “we do not yet know what a
body is capable of.”34
From this standpoint, micropolitics maps the molecular levels of body
politics defi ned by intensive relations—the symbiotic association and disassociation of particles and forces operating on the networked body-mind
parallelism. It exposes body politics to the schizogenic plane of symbiotic
variations swerving from the linear trajectories of the economy of fi liation. Thus micropolitics is not synonymous with local politics confi ned to
specific biotechnological conditions. For micropolitics, each local relation
resonates with collective conditions expanding on a larger scale (continuity
in variation). Similarly, micropolitics needs not be confused with a situated
politics of embodiment defi ned by given partialities. Micropolitics does
not associate relations of power with actual terms without accounting for
their indeterminate potentials. In this sense, micropolitics encompasses all
levels of stratification (biophysical, biocultural, and biodigital), suggesting
not an identity but a continual feedback of relations between distinct levels
of order, which are virtually linked insofar as they emerge from a material
plane of potential variations.
Thus sex is not an actual form and function of transmission reiterating dominant models of evolution but becomes an indeterminate quantum
of thought and extension, proliferating through the contagious trading
of matter that affect—impinge on—the sociocultural determination of
positions (gender). The sex-gender relation no longer determines the identity—analogy or resemblance—between biological function and cultural
behavior, but involves the emergence of virtual potentials that act on the
sex-gender biocultural determinants. Thus the biocultural actualizations
of sex and gender, based on the central function of sexual reproduction,
are never to be embraced as the ultimate forms and functions of sex. Sex
rather involves a virtual-actual process of transmission, a nonclimactic distribution in which actualizations do not exhaust but intensify the
capacity of an open-ended body to enter new symbiotic compositions.
From this standpoint, it would be misleading to argue that this capacity
coincides with the present biodigital mode of transmission transforming
the sex-gender relation. The actualization of biodigital sex lays open the
emergence of new mutations, which act back on the biocultural order of
matter, which will in turn unleash unpredictable transformations of the
Information and Symbiotic Micropolitics
43
sex-gender relation in the future. The point, a question of neither relativism or determination, is a matter of relation, laying out what happens in
the process of making a mutual yet unpredictable envelopment in doing,
rather than an extrinsic addition of parts.
The biodigital assemblage operates as an index of a micropolitical
field of relations on a nature-culture continuum. Indeed, this micropolitics, far from being a vindication of interests (biocultural positions of
the subject woman), embraces a Spinozist ethology of the body: speeds
and forces entering in relation without ultimate fi nality. 35 It therefore
entails a turbulent deviation from the nucleic organization of matter where
sexual reproduction determines both the identity of sex and the binarism
of the sexes at the heart of the human-centered perspective of evolution.
Micropolitics involves a becoming-molecular of femininity unlocking the
machinic dynamics of desire from the oedipal woman, organic sex and
fi liative reproduction letting desire run in all layers of matter’s organization. 36 Thus femininity no longer remains specific to one mode of sex. It
is not localized in one body or another, in one form-function or another.
It is not an identity, an individual unity. This molecular femininity entails
a tactic of belonging to a virtual plane deployed in the everyday, in which
techniques of normalization ask the body to take positions, to individuate and to identify according to the forms and functions of fi liative sex.
Molecular femininity thus becomes an experimental belonging to a nature
of contagious transmissions rather than appealing to a natural design that
engenders our biocultural positions. In the everyday, such an experiment
returns with all its indetermination whenever we ask what is nature in the
world of bioinformatic capitalism.
Molecular femininity thus entails a new level of engagement with body
politics in the bioinformatic phase of capitalism. This level suggests neither
the reach of an ultimate difference—the claim of an ultimate biodigital
position of femininity—nor a direct dissolution of difference in molecular matter. Femininity is not undifferentiated. Nor does it coincide with
biocultural positions. Rather, molecular femininity belongs to the mutating assemblages of matter. Without identifying femininity with nature,
molecular femininity indicates a strange attraction between feminine
desire and machinic nature—an intensive connection between feminine
sex and biodigital sex unfolding a-fi liative, a-organic, aclimactic assemblages of desire. This is not an analogy or similitude between two already
formed terms. Rather, it is an asymmetric conjunction of autonomous
forces laying out a metastable relation between modes or modifications of
sex partaking or belonging to a vaster process—a virtual or abstract reality
that encompasses critical knots of change or intensive differentiations.
44
Luciana Parisi
In this sense, micropolitics points to the amodal link between technologies of reproduction, nature, and feminine desire: the virtual plane of
immanence out of which the most varied modifications of matter emerge.
This link suggests a new approach to body politics involving a materialist
construction of sex that moves beyond the critical impasse of the politics
of representation. The latter congeals the microchanges of relations into
one structural aggregate (the subject, the organism, and the signifier) that
is erected as a delegate of a potential multiplicity. In this sense, the politics
of representation is a macropolitics concerned with points of equilibrium,
the perception of movement from a distance, from above and from afar;
the structuring of movement. Macropolitics will always ask molecular
femininity to represent the sociopolitical position of the subject woman,
and biological forms and functions of reproductive sex to represent desire.
Yet it can be argued that macropolitics only corresponds to one level of
the processual dynamics of power that affects—and in turn transforms—
the macropolitics of sociocultural positions. Micropolitics comes neither
before nor after macropolitics. It is immanent to all forms and functions
of macropolitics. It resonates through all kinds of political organizations
insofar as it precedes and exceeds the constitution of sociocultural determinants (gender, race, class).
The strange attraction between feminine desire, information trading,
and biotechnologies invites us to engage with a micropolitical field of relations that coincides with a Spinozist ethics-ethology of nature. This field
implies working against the ground of a morality founded on the illusionary hierarchy of consciousness over thought, mind over body, and on the
ultimate domination of bodily passions through the judgment of that which
is good and evil. 37 The primacy of judgment over unpredictable dynamics
of encounter between bodies defi nes the morality of the human-centered
perspective of nature. Spinoza’s ethics departs from such a perspective
with the notion of parallelism, according to which, rather than a body-mind
hierarchy, each action in the mind coincides with an action in the body, and
each passion in the body with a passion in the mind. 38 The moral system
of judgment is replaced by the qualitative differences (good and bad) of
modes of existence that are relative and partial. Good is not a value but
entails a direct relation between bodies that increases collective capacities to act and become. Bad, on the other hand, is defi ned by poisonous
encounters between bodies that decompose a body’s relations of parts.
This ethics-ethology of nature defi nes the micropolitics of sex as
involving the joyful and sad passions of a body-mind. For Spinoza, only
joyful encounters catalyze the power of a collective body to become active.
Yet this power does not then entail the pleasurable release of an ultimate
Information and Symbiotic Micropolitics
45
biocultural difference simply reiterating the climactic drive of teleological
nature. Quite the contrary, in bioinformatic capitalism, the becomingactive of molecular femininity implies pulling out the virtual threads of
sex through the propagation of symbiotic compositions.
Notes
1. In this article, the notion of feminine desire is primarily related to a process
of becoming. My hypothesis of feminine desire connects the philosophy of Luce
Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. See Irigaray’s critique of Deleuze
and Guattari’s ontology of becoming in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 140–41, and in An Ethics
of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: Athlone,
1993), 83–94. See also Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 160–83.
2. Nonlinear dynamics defi ne the far-from-equilibrium organization of
physical, biological, and social systems. See Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers,
Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984);
Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature (New
York: Free Press, 1997); Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Refl ections in
Natural History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991); Stuart A. Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Manuel De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy
(London: Continuum, 2002).
3. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W.
Scott Palmer (New York: Zone, 1991).
4. On the importance of becoming-woman for contemporary feminist politics, see Elisabeth Grosz, “Deleuze’s Bergson: Duration, the Virtual, and the Politics of the Future,” in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. Ian Buchanan and Claire
Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 214–34.
5. On the theory of endosymbiosis, see Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association:
A History of Symbiosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Dorion Sagan,
“Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity,” in Incorporation, ed. Jonathan Crary
and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 362–85; Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis
in Cell Evolution (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1981), 1–14.
6. On the notion of machinic, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, AntiOedipus, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and
Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone, 1983), 284–85; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1987), 10; Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin, 1985); Gilles
Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York:
Zone Books, 1988), 60–61; Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans.
Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), 110–21. On the difference
between Bergson and Spinoza in the machinic philosophy of life, see Keith Ansell
Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999), 11–15.
46
Luciana Parisi
7. For a recent insight in these debates, see Mary Flagan and Austin Booth,
eds., Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002); Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999); Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones (London: Fourth Estate,
1997).
8. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, the dynamics of desire are not to be
associated with the notion of lack, the natural given, or the Freudian notion of
pleasure. Desire implies the constitution of a field of immanence—a body without
organs—marked by thresholds of intensity. This body is biological, collective,
and political. The politics of desire suggests a politics of materiality that places
feminine desire on collective assemblages. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, 530n39; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia, 333; Gilles Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure,” in Foucault and His Interlocutors,
ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. D. W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997), 183–95. On the bioinformatic logic of power in cybernetic capitalism, see
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (London: FA Books), 1991; Eugene
Thacker, “Redefi ning Bioinformatics: A Critical Analysis of Technoscientific
Bodies,” Enculturation, Post-Digital Studies 3 (2000), www.enculturation.gmu.edu/
3_1/toc.html; and Thacker, “The Post-Genomic Era Has Already Happened,”
Biopolicy Journal 3 (2000), www.bioline.org.br/.
9. The model of representation refers to a system of organization of signs
where structures of meaning arrange gestural, perceptual, cognitive, cultural,
and technological signs under the hierarchies of the signifier. See Félix Guattari,
Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York:
Penguin, 1984).
10. On the notion of materialist constructivism, see Brian Massumi, The
Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2002), x.
11. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, By Means of Natural Selection
or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (New York: Modern
Library, 1993). See Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche
and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1997), 117; Ansell Pearson,
Germinal Life, 69.
12. In the nineteenth century, Alfred Russel Wallace associated Darwin’s
notion of descent with modification with the term evolution intended as organic
progress. See Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Philogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).
13. See August Weismann, Studies in the Theory of Descent, 2 vols., trans. R.
Medola (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1882); Ansell
Pearson, Germinal Life, 4–9, 10–11.
14. For Freud, libido is a regressive satisfaction bound up with the death
instinct—the inorganic. For Deleuze and Guattari, libido operates as a productive
impulse tending toward turbulent becoming (supermolecular declinations) rather
than circling in a self-enclosed cycle. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,
Capitalism, and Schizophrenia, 333.
15. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey, vol.
8 (London: Hogarth, 1920–22), 55–56.
Information and Symbiotic Micropolitics
47
16. See Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Lanham,
MD: University Press of America, 1983), 269; Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life,
59–69.
17. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 258.
18. Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” in Incorporations, ed.
Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 306.
19. Kauffman, Origins of Order.
20. Ibid., 442.
21. Lynn Margulis, The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998).
22. On the symbiotic emergence of mitochondria, see Lynn Margulis and
Dorion Sagan, Origins of Sex (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).
23. Sagan, “Metametazoa,” 363.
24. On neo-Darwinist sex selection, see Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex
and Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Macmillan, 1994); Karl Sigmund,
Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution, and Behaviour (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 124–53.
25. See Susan Aldridge, The Thread of Life: The Story of Genes and Genetic
Engineering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Thacker, “Redefi ning Bioinformatics”; and Thacker, “The Post-Genomic Era.”
26. For a more detailed explanation of this process, see Andy Coghlan and
David Concar, “How the Clock of Life Was Turned Back,” New Scientist, March
1997, 4–5; Philip Cohen, “We Ask. They Answer. The Clone Zone: A Special
Report,” New Scientist, 9 May 1998, 32–35.
27. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia,
91; Manuel De Landa, “Nonorganic Life,” in Incorporation, ed. Jonathan Crary
and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 129–67.
28. For a detailed explanation of the difference between Bergson’s élan vital
and Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic philosophy of life, see Deleuze, Bergsonism,
100, 104; Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, 65–69.
29. On the notion of stratic formation, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, 39–74; Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of
Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 1997).
30. Isabelle Stengers problematizes the epistemological study of technoscience
defi ning science as homogeneous and ahistorical in Power and Invention: Situating
Science, trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
31. On Deleuze and Guattari’s geological stratification of the body, see
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 60, 62, 64, 302, 395; Guattari, Molecular Revolution, 149.
32. On the machinic phylum, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus,
406–7, 409–10; De Landa, Nonorganic Life, 129–67.
33. On the difference between micropolitics and macropolitics, see Deleuze
and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 213–14.
34. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics; Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect; Selected
Letters, ed. S. Feldman, trans. S. Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), pt. 3,
Preface.
48
Luciana Parisi
35. This ethology entails the passions and actions of a body that defi ne the
materiality of desire. For Spinoza, desire is appetite (appetitus) accompanied by
the awareness of a passage, the information of the state of the affection of the
body. See Spinoza, Ethics, pt. 3, 9, scholium.
36. This micropolitics also relates to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becomingwoman. On the importance of the becoming-woman for body politics, see Grosz,
Volatile Bodies, 176–77; and Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, eds., Deleuze and
Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
37. Spinoza, Ethics, pts. 1, 3.
38. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 22.
Information and Symbiotic Micropolitics
49