Communicating the Body \ Interpreting the Code
Pharaoh Khufu intends to secure his riches beyond the grave, and into the afterlife. He captures the greatest architect known in his kingdom, and forces him – through a threat to his entire people – to build him an impenetrable tomb: a Pyramid no thief can plunder. The architect sets to work, knowing that upon […]
System of Enthalpy
Rooted in our language is a bias. It’s a bias that we can hardly be blamed for, based as it is in our conception of ourselves as distinct entities whose existence can be felt, from one moment to the next, through time. Nature appears to move ‘forwards’, the ice-cube melts if left unattended, the scream in the night dissipates into silence.
For very similar reasons we see society as a progressive entity. The 19th Century, Positivist appeal to a human reality that moves towards an ultimate goal still lingers in our rational arguments, in our science, in our humanist rhetoric. Again, we see technology as endlessly progressive. The tractor is fundamentally better than the plough, the internet trounces the telephone; the mailed envelope; the scream in the dark night.
But forwards is not the only way that things can move.
Most days I head to the British Library and pick up my pile of books from the counter. At the moment half of them are about ‘play’, about the systems of rules that mediate human games and what the order of games can tell us about human social activity. The other half of my book pile is made up of works of philosophy written in the last 30 years. Works by Deleuze, Serres, Agamben and Foucault. Their work speaks to me in a non-progressive way. Deleuze and Serres especially expound systems of thinking that grow like a supernovae or a colony of slime mould. From one perspective the supernovae is a system destined to implode, its central core rebounding the slew of material manufactured in the star’s long lifetime, out and into the wider cosmos. A slime mould, similarly, appears to be a system destined to grow, procreate and expand its genetic impact on the world. Both of these systems though can be better understood if we take them out of their human perceived, progressive contexts. To really grasp the supernovae one must understand the laws that govern its cycle of energy ebb and bloom. The same laws that govern the life cycle of the slime-mould. Thermo dynamics and the transitional principles that underlie physical systems – as seeming chaos bifurcates into autopoietic order.
How these principles underlie the philosophy of Deleuze and Serres is difficult to summarise here, and also dangerous. I am still a novice when it comes to their theoretical paradigms. What can be said though is that their principles are non-progressive, non-positivistic. The order they see in social systems, in cultural artefacts and metaphysical constructions is better understood as order determined by thresholds rather than historical movements, by the flow of information between systems, rather than the inevitable consequences of scientific and social orders.
At present I am working through the vague notion that our systems of symbolic communication would be better understood through their non-linear logics. That sacrifice and sacrament, scribe and inscription, digital code and malleable media are each a series of complexity thresholds in a grand order of semiotics that has been growing and blooming, shrinking and decaying in time with the ebb and flow of human culture and technology.
I write this here as an annotation on things to come (on my website). It is not a delineated path of enquiry. It is merely a structure I intend to topographically identify, map and encourage. Here’s to Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres, as well as some other names I will label their accomplices, such as Giorgio Agamben, Manuel de Landa, Lev Manovich and a whole heap more.
Raising Neanderthals: Metaphysics at the Limits of Science
A face to face encounter, devoid of the warm appeal of flesh. The eyes are glass, a cold blue crystal reflects the light in a way real eyes never would. A muzzle of hair, perhaps taken from a barbershop floor or the hind quarters of an animal. The painted scalp peeks through the sparse strands: […]
Raising Neanderthals
In northern Spain 49,000 years ago, 11 Neanderthals were murdered. Their tooth enamel shows that each of them had gone through several periods of severe starvation, a condition their assailants probably shared. Cut marks on the bones indicate the people were butchered with stone tools. About 700 feet inside El Sidrön cave, a research team including Lalueza-Fox excavated 1,700 bones from that cannibalistic feast. Much of what is known about Neanderthal genetics comes from those 11 individuals.
Lalueza-Fox does not plan to sequence the entire genome of the El Sidrön Neanderthals. He is interested in specific genes. “I choose genes that are somehow related to individuality,” he says. “I’d like to create a personal image of these guys.”
Extract from: Should we Clone Neanderthals?
Genetics has reduced the organic world to the status of a code. In a gesture that continues the work of Descartes, mankind has separated itself from its own constitution. The mind, or perhaps the self, is merely anchored to the body, rather than reliant on it. Since Descartes we have been able to refer to the organic body as other, and we continue to congratulate ourselves.
Genetic sequencing instigates a new kind of dualism. That of body and code. The reduction of living matter to four strands of nucleic acid; the code constitutes the life, yet it is not the life. On the computer screen, or in a sequencing lab, the code floats free from the living, becoming pure information in and of itself. We are now able to refer to the information of the human as other and again we congratulate ourselves.
From Descartes onwards, through Kant and the enlightenment, philosophy now finds itself at an impasse. By separating the mind and the body dualism also separated the tools of enquiry by which the holistic ‘human’ could be understood. Man is not of world, man is not even of body: and so it transpires that man is not even of the sequence; the code; the malleable constituent of life itself.
This new dualism opens itself through the rhetoric of genetics. Science is now capable of handling the entire history of life as if it were a cut-up text; a freakish maelstrom of free-floating base-pairs mangled in some Burroughs-esque sequencing shredder. To science the sequence maketh the Neanderthal, but it does not constitute mankind.
But what of the historicity of those creatures? For Neanderthal are much more than a genetic cousin, labelled in similitude. The Neanderthal is a symbol; a mythic resonance. Neanderthals are a different category of person, literally lost to the world, but not lost to our memory. In being so close in kind to us they represent the ultimate other. As much creature as human; as much removed as they are imminent.
Do we give them the gift of life by re-sequencing their code? By ushering them into our time through test-tubes and computer simulations? Forgetting for a moment the religious efficacy entailed by this position (by my use of the word ‘gift’), the moral implications alone out number the minds available to ponder them. And still not a single metaphysical question is raised.
What is it exactly that we think we are cloning? I write more on this over at 3quarksdaily…
