Draft - Footnotes Incomplete
Richard Doyle
rmd12@psu.edu
Panic...the sudden, intolerable knowing that everything is alive.1
William S. Burroughs
Alife, I must admit, makes me nervous. Not the deep anxiety of any fear and loathing of machines, those alleged alienators of souls, labor, depth, bodies - in short `Technology." No, alife is like a joke that I just can't seem to get. You know the feeling... Oh. I'll admit that some of the creatures are, well, "cute", that they scamper across my screen, seemingly out of control, on the same drugged electricity as the Ever Ready Battery Bunny. Sometime I'll get all excited about a simulation, sitting at my desk while I simulate work, and fetch a colleague from across the hall. "Look!" I'll say" Look! IT'S ALIVE!" and point at the swirling, flickering, flocking pixels. "It's alive!"
There just seems to me no convincing them. Must be that "two culture split" that I have read so much about, the one that interdisciplinary types such as myself are terribly busy hybridizing and "troubling" with software packages like Simlife, courses on Philip K Dick and the rhetoric of science. I've even tried the old rhetorical ploy of implicating my colleagues in the simulation. With LifeMaker, a cellular automata program available on the net, I spelled out my colleague's name in "cells" and put the simulation on ultrafast. The cells swirled, flickered and dissolved the writing and produced something akin to a mutating bingo table. My colleague, a Joyce scholar, just looked at the screen, then at me, and said" It's just language, rhetoric boy." And this guy has a say in my tenure.
In these situations I realize that I am being called upon to justify my expertise, so I lean back in my chair, do my best impression of a PROFESSOR, and provide some historical and cultural context.
"Just information, you mean." I say this as if I have trumped him, as if the distinction is itself so stuffed with information that the scales should fall from his eyes. "But since Erwin Schrodinger's articulation of the genetic substance as a "code-script"in 1943, life itself has gradually been conflated with information. The trajectory is long and complex of course - from George Gamow's 1954 discussion of the "diamond code" scheme for the translation of DNA into proteins, Jacques Monod and Francois Jacob's research on induction and the genetic "program", to the recent human genome intiatives and their attempt to decode the Book of Life - but suffice to say that from the perspective of many contemporary biologists, life is just an interesting configuration of information. Biologist Richard Dawkins, who you may have read about in the New Yorker, has claimed that we are nothing but "lumbering robots", vehicles for the propagation of DNA. It's all in my book, On Beyond Living."
"I still don't get it. Which part is alive?"
At this point I despair, because, I have to admit, it starts to feel like I am explaining a joke, a task that is neither fun nor funny. And since this guy is smart, and since he's on the personnel committee, the one that rules on the veracity of my impression of a Professor come tenure time, I can't really pull off the knowing, laughing" Oh, you don't get it. Well, if you don't get it, I can't really explain it. It would just take too long." At least, I can't say any of that. So all I can really do is imply it, suggest through my silence that it's a generational, theoretical thing. Perhaps he doesn't have the secret Post Structuralist A-life decoder ring, I suggest through my silence. "I'll give you a copy of this essay I am writing about alife when I am done", I say. "Maybe that'll help."
.
So alife makes me nervous because it seems to be inarticulable in some way. And periodically, I don't get the joke. But it also makes me nervous because I can't simply write it off. Because there is something uncanny about alife. It's a creepy doubling of something that no longer exists - "Life."
I speak not of innumerable, insatiable zombie bodies that roam the earth, although, as people like Steve Shaviro and Gilles Deleuze point out, zombies are informatic beings.2 Rather, "Life", as a scientific object, seems to have been distributed. No longer the attribute of a sovereign organism that does battle with its evolutionary problem set, life has become a phenomenon that emerges out of networks. The very success of the informatic paradigm - in fields as diverse as molecular biology and ecology - has paradoxically dislocated the very object of biological research. "Biologists no longer study life today.3 writes Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist Francois Jacob- "they study living systems." This "`Post vital" biology is, by and large, interested less in the characteristics and functions of living organisms than in sequences of molecules and their effects. These sequences are themselves articulated though databases and networks; they therefore garner their effects through relentless connections, relations with an "outside", rather than through the autonomous interiority of an organism. This transformation of the 20th century life sciences, while hardly homogeneous and not univocal, marks a change in kind for biology, whose very object has shifted, become "distributed."
Which makes Alife's claims concerning the vitality of these virtual organisms all the more perplexing. For if "Life" seems to have disappeared as a sovereign entity and joined the ranks of all those other relational attributes - economic value, for example - than it seems odd that it should reappear, so visibly, on my screen.4 What makes this possible? How could computers - the silicon substrate - generate effects that have no original, life?
It's enough to make one believe in time travel. It's as if computers, with the right softwares, could travel back to a past when life was an autonomous attribute of organisms, capture it, and display it on the screen. Theoretical biologist Marcello Barbieri, though, would argue that organisms have always already been networks. Moving beyond Johannsen's rendering of the organism into the duality of "genotype" and "phenotype", Barbieri argues that living systems must be understood as a tripartite configuration of genotype - hereditary information, primarily although not exclusively born by DNA - Ribotype - the swarm of translational apparatuses that transform DNA into the tertiary structures of folded proteins - and phenotype - the dynamic embodiment of these informations and their transformations.5 Crucial to Barbieri's argument is the recognition that DNA "information" is necessary but not sufficient for the emergence of life; yet another translational actant is needed to transform the immortal syntax of nucleic acids into the somatic semantics of living systems.
By analogy, I want to suggest that a-life, too, emerges only through the complex of translational mechanisms that render it articulable as "lively." The "ribotype" that transforms the coded iterations and differences of alife softwares into the lifelike behavior of artificial life is composed of "rhetorical softwares." These rhetorical formulations - as "simple" as a newly coined metaphor or as complex as an entire discourse - don't "construct" scientific objects so much as they discipline them, render them available for scientific observation, analysis and argument. Much as recent work in science studies has documented technoscience's deployment of the practices of visualization in order to make available unprecedented knowledges and techniques, I will argue that tactics of narrativization and persuasion are also crucial deployments in technoscientific enterprises. On this rhetorical plane, I will argue, the tactics of "localization" and "ubiquity" are particularly powerful in artificial life, even as these effects are in tension. "Localization" makes possible the notion that some particular organism "in" or "on" the computer is "alive", thereby occluding the complex ecology of brains, flesh, code and electric grids that alife thrives on and enabling the technoscientific narrative to flourish. At the same time, rhetorics of "ubiquity" provoke the possibility that, as in Burroughs' observation above, everything could be alive.
All scientific practices, of course, are differently comported by their rhetorical softwares: my focus has been on the researches and insights enabled by articulations of organisms as extensions of "code." But alife is in a slightly different position with respect to its rhetorical components, as the actual existence of artificial life, as "Life", is continually at stake. This crisis of vitality that pervades alife is not simply due to alife's status as a "simulation"; as I suggested above, alife merges out of a context in which quite literally, life has disappeared, as the "life effect" becomes representable only by networks rather than articulable and definable locales. Despite the incessant repetition and localization of life in pro-life discourse, for example, vitality at the end of the millennium seems to be haunted by an ambiguity, an inarticulability that remains to be managed and "sutured" by violence, rhetorical and otherwise. My challenge here will be to determine the specific rhetorical mechanisms that enable some versions of artificial life, a broad "ribotype" that makes alife such lively creatures at this moment.
As virtual organisms, alife creatures are not "fake." Like all simulacra, they are copies without original, producing an effect not of reference - what would they refer to? - but of doubling, the uncanny feeling of familiarity in the unfamiliar realm of the computer screen. They double or "fold" the organic into the virtual, a hybridizing of machine and organism that, inevitably, makes one laugh. We laugh nervously because while we are not in a state of Burroughsian Panic, all of the technological in Frankensteinian rebirth, full of life- no conspiracy involving a toaster, chainsaw and a couple of CD players is in the cards - we nonetheless get the sense that indeed anything could be alive.. This is the first element of the ribotype of artificial life, a rhetorical software that smears the borders between the computer and its environment, what we could call a silicon abduction.
Abducted By Silicon
If artificial life creatures, as actualizations of information, enjoy the burdens and benefits of vitality, they do so through the operation of what Charles Sanders Peirce characterized as "abduction." Peirce - a 19th century polymath who made contributions to mathematics, semiotics and philosophy - formulated his theory of abduction in order to supplement the more traditional logical categories of induction and deduction. Scientific thinking, Peirce held, didn't always proceed via the clean operation of these categories - Kepler's discovery of the laws of planetary motion was among Peirce's favorite examples of a scientific practice that exceeded these logical frameworks. Abduction, as a category of reasoning, is characterized by its reliance on an absence:
An abduction is a method of forming a general prediction without any positive assurance that it will succeed either in the special case or usually, its justification being that it is the only possible hope of regulating our future conduct rationally, and that induction from past experience gives us strong encouragement to hope that it will be successful in the future. 6
A missing term - one that may possibly arrive in the future - completes abduction's argument. The "possibility" that inheres in any specific abductive enterprise is tethered to the pathos of "hope", an encounter with the future without grounds but with calculation, anticipation and a bit of desperation - "the only possible hope of regulating our future conduct rationally." The past, too, offers itself up as a support to abductive reasoning, but only in the form of the "inductive" habit that Peirce identifies with sheer repetition and persistence, attributes that do little to aid in the evaluation of any future event.
Still, Peirce favored abduction because it seemed to be the only office of reasoning that allowed for the arrival of a novel, unprecedented thought. Induction, tied to habit, tends to subsume each event into the Same, and the logical necessity of the deductive syllogism relies on full knowledge of all the premises, knowledge which, by definition, is not available in exploratory scientific enterprise.7 Thus Peirce sought to describe the persuasive force of abduction - what he sometimes called "hypothesis" - in terms other than those reserved for logic:
Hypothesis substitutes, for a complicated tangle of predicates attached to one subject, a single conception. Now there is a peculiar sensation belonging to the act of thinking that each of these predicates inheres in the subject. In hypothetic inference this complicated feeling so produced is replaced by a single feeling of greater intensity, that belonging to the act of thinking the hypothetical conclusion...We may say, therefore, that hypothesis produces the sensuous of thought, and induction the habitual element.8
Peirce's rhetoric and semiotics sought, among other things, to materialize our understandings of language and conviction, so the "sensuous" character of abductive thinking should not be read through the lens of the Platonic and Aristotelian suspicions of pathos. Instead, Peirce offers it as a description of the operation of the only mode of reasoning that seems fit for an encounter with the future, a deployment of persuasive force that gambles on the unprecedented.
In Christopher Langton's 1987 manifesto for artificial life, precisely such an encounter with the future takes place. The missing term in the abductive transaction is "life." Writing of biology's need to expand its purview and look at material substrates other than carbon, Langton claims that the traditional narrow context of biology (!) makes it impossible for researchers to really "understand" life. "Only when we are able to view life-as-we-know-it in the larger context of life -as -it -could -be will we really understand the nature of the beast." With this claim, Langton offers a formalist definition of life, one that argues that the phenomenon of living systems is tied to organizational and not material attributes. This hypothesis is not itself new - Maturana and Varela's notion of "autopoietic" machines also argues that life is an organizational phenomenon, one that is perhaps independent of its material instantiation. Indeed, the rhetorical practices of "information" that have transformed the life sciences support such a dislocated conception of living systems, as "information" becomes mobile, capable of instantiation in contexts other than its origin. What is peculiar to Langton's abductive move is the claim that one can only understand life adequately on the basis of its instantiation elsewhere, "life writ large across all material substrates...is the true subject matter of biology."
A tension emerges from this bold move into the "synthetic approach to biology" where organisms emerge in silico. What Langton proposes is as novel a shift for biology as the discovery and study of microscopic organisms with the deployment of the microscope. Instead of greater magnification that allows for the representation of a new realm of the organic, the iterative capabilities of the computer make visible the lively and self organizing capacities of an inorganic stratum And yet, in its logical formulation, Langton's claim depends upon the very knowledge that it seeks. The very "understanding" that is intended to orient the life sciences - "the true subject matter of biology" - is yet to come, bundled with an analysis of "life-as-it-could-be." In the meantime, our very criteria for identifying and studying living systems remain vague, operational definitions haunted by their character as simulacra. The very impetus for artificial life research - the lack of sufficient knowledge of the formal attributes of life - stymies what Langton will call the "big" claim of artificial life, a claim that defines in silico creatures as "alive."
The big claim is that a properly organized set or artificial primitives carrying out the same functional roles as biomolecules in natural living systems will support a process that will be "alive" in the same way that natural organisms are alive. Artificial Life will therefore be genuine life - it will simply be made out of different stuff than the life that has evolved here on Earth.9
This claim, anchored as it is in an understanding of the "way that natural organisms are alive," begs the very question that alife allegedly illuminates: What "way", precisely, are natural organisms alive?
But, as Peirce pointed out, the dependence of an abductive argument on a term that is yet to come, off the Earth - such as "life-as-it-could-be" - is not simply lacking in logical coherence. Such an opening toward the future allows for the contingent, even improbable arrival of precisely such a missing term. Indeed, Peirce writes of abduction, " Never mind how improbable these suppositions are; everything which happens is infinitely improbable."10 For Langton, the supposition of a synthetic biology substitutes for, even doubles, yet another supposition:
Since it is quite unlikely that organisms based on different physical chemistries will present themselves to us for study in the foreseeable future, our only alternative is to try to synthesize alternative life-forms ourselves - Artificial Life: life made by man rather than by nature.11
Along with its cousin, SETI, alife posits that life is an informational construct and then seeks it out. Unlike SETI, which merely attempts to identify its object of study, alife constitutes the entities that are its purview. Along with SETI, however, alife comes up against an operational difficulty: How to determine whether its object is "really" alive?
To this query, Langton implicitly offers an intriguing answer. Discussing the transformation of an artificial life "genotype" or GTYPE into its "phenotype" or PTYPE, Langton traces out a irreducible contingency in artificial life, and perhaps, life:
...it is not possible in the general case to adduce which specific alterations must be made to a GTYPE to effect a desired change in the PTYPE. The problem is that any specific PTYPE trait is, in general, an effect of many nonlinear interactions between the behavioral primitives of the system . Consequently, given an arbitrary proposed change to the PTYPE, it may be impossible to determine by any formal procedure exactly what changes would have to be made to the GTYPE to effect that- and only that - change in the PTYPE. It is not a practically computable problem. There is no way to calculate the answer - short of exhaustive search - even though there may be an answer.12
Assuming that an attribute of PTYPE would be "living", then, no inspection of any GTYPE can yield an understanding of any PTYPE's liveliness. What, then, would provide the alife researcher with understanding of the liveliness of a PTYPE?
"Trial and error", Langton claims, is "the only way to proceed in the face of such an unpredictability." On this abductive account - it can only make assumptions in the face of the future - alife phenotypes, PTYPES, can only emerge through the actual execution of an algorithm - its translation and "expression", a process that is itself characterized by multiple levels of interaction:
It should be noted that the PTYPE is a multilevel phenomenon. First, there is the PTYPE associated with each particular instruction - the effect that the instruction has on the entity's behavior when it is expressed. Second, there is the PTYPE associated with each individual entity - its individual behavior within the aggregate. Third, there is the PTYPE associated with the aggregate as a whole.13
Thus the actual status of any alife creature cannot be inferred from its initial configuration - GTYPE - and its expression is characterized by levels, thresholds which are themselves the outcome of multiple "non-linear interactions." If life, as Langton claims, is not "stuff", but is instead an "effect", then the effects of liveliness can only be articulated after the execution, as it were, of the alife code.
What I want to suggest is that at each level, acts of translation occur. "Within " the screen, alife organisms survive based on their interactions with both their virtual environment and other alife creatures. So, for example, the strange dogs called "Moofs" that sometimes populate Simlife emerge as "translations" of their digital genomes, and one can tinker with the genomes in the hope of tweaking Moof success and behavior, but the ecology even of Simlife is sufficiently complex that one cannot predict the effect on the moof phenotype, at least in terms of its "behavior" within the virtual ecology that it inhabits.
But once we shift our focus from the alleged "interior" of the computer, we encounter yet another translation practice. Moofs, of course, are inoculated into the virtual ecology of Simlife based on the preferences and habits of the humans that interact with them. Their overall success - the number of times that they sprout on silicon substrates all over the world - depends on their ability to seduce humans. That is, their "liveliness" - their ability to achieve the reproductive success and other "lifelike behaviors" in the virtual ecology of the computer - depends on their success in representing "life" to their human wetware. This would, of course, be simply tautological, were it not for the fact that our definitions of life are, at best, vague criteria. Thus the success of alife organisms in their virtual ecology is tied to their success in an actual ecology, an ecology also populated by humans. As iteration machines, computers are able tools in the iterative, performative practice of "life", the emergence of a vitality effect without origin.
Hence the cute, perky vitality of most alife organisms. Alife organisms, of course, need not be "attractive" in this same way, just as all flowering plants do not tempt the wasp as the orchid does.14 But alife creatures must indeed represent the life effect in a fashion that is visible and articulable to the humans that interact with them. Thus at the level of PTYPE where the speech act "It's Alive!" emerges, alife creatures require a ribotypical apparatus that will render them narratable and persuasive to their human hosts. If an alife organism falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, it only makes a virtual sound. Not because of any hankering for some allegedly postmodern solipsism, but because actualized alife organisms represent life for a living. The alife organisms that achieve the most success in Darwinian terms are those that are most readily and remarkably narrated. This is as much an attribute of alife behavior as their feeding habits, and at the level of the actual, it is an obligatory passage point for success.
I want to be clear that I am not claiming that alife organisms are simply the result of human "decisions", or that it is only the rhetorical softwares that are bundled with alife organisms that make them lively. Such a humanist understanding of alife would overlook the fact that humans do not simply choose rhetorical practices; rather, they are persuaded by them. The rhetorical softwares of information that transformed biology, for example, were less careful deployments of knowledge then contingent experiments in persuasion.15 And the success that alife organisms have as virtual organisms is not "fake"; it is simply a another level of PTYPE, another level of contingency, than the actual.16
Philosopher's Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari articulate this distinction between the actual and the virtual as one based on "chaos", the sheer contingency of an unactualized event. Real but not actualized, the virtual is a consistency - such as a configuration of code or a spore - that remains to be executed. The actual is the result of a taming of the sheer multiplicity of the virtual - an operation which is not engaged with time, it is aternal or untimely - by being ordered into instants:
An actual system. . .[is] defined as a time between two instants, or as times between many instants.17
The virtual is not, therefore, "unreal." Nor does it lack actuality - such a description would depend upon an abduction of the future, a retroactive understanding of the virtual in terms of its instantiation as actual. Nor is the virtual without the "resistances" and finitudes we often attribute to the real. It bears the tension of is own constraints - the capacity to be rendered into a virtual substrate of code, the materiality of it substrate, and perhaps most strangely, the capability of encountering the difference of the future. Feminist thinker Elizabeth Grosz distinguishes this characteristic of the virtual/actual relation precisely in terms of the occurrence of the future to the virtual, "what befalls it."
The movement of realisation seems like the concretisation of a preexistent plan or program; by contrast, the movement of actualisation is the opening up of the virtual to what befalls it.18
What befalls alife creatures is, of course, itself multiple. The comportment of the alife organism in terms of "instants", for example, occurs at different levels on different substrates. While the "temporality" of alife's virtual ecology spins along at great "speed" - one can watch the years go by in simlife on a powermac with 66mgz - alife's encounter with its human wetware plods along in entirely different instants, those articulable within the ongoing, contingent projects of negentropy that we are. By the same token, the actualization of alife creatures is multiple - the evolution and emergence of difference occurs in relation to both the materiality of alife's virtual ecology and its nonlinear relationship to other alife creatures.
Crucially for alife, though, is the fact that one level of their actualization depends upon their ability to be "befallen" by human wetware. It should be objected, of course, that the privilege of this last level of actualization - the level at which "It's alive" emerges - is entirely enmeshed with the ecology of humans. Thinking the novelty and specificity of artificial life, though, demands that we encounter the crucial ways in which human corporeality is entwined with alife's status as "life", even if it does not dominate alife as such, virtually.19 Indeed, in some sense that I will discuss in more detail at some instant in the future, the actualization of alife creatures as "life" is perhaps the least novel level in the alife PTYPE, one that reterritorializes the strange contingencies of the virtual into that old saw, "life." Indeed, perhaps the simulation of life is but a ruse, a hoax or stealth tactic that enables the propagation of entities that dwell much more in alterity than life, novel entities that mime life as a tactic and not an essence.
Artificial life is not, for example, an operation of simple "artificial selection", where humans "breed" the liveliest alife creatures, consciously or unconsciously. Instead, alife creatures' very existence as actualized "life", rather than interesting enterprises in computation or virtual life, is enmeshed with the human phenotypes with which they interact. The "original" status of alife as life - that which makes it replicable in the first place - is thoroughly bound up with the affect - Peirce's "sensuous character of thought" - of the humans that encounter them.20 At an actualized level of PTYPE, that level at which alife become replicable as life and spread across the hard disks and ram of the infosphere, the liveliness of alife creatures is contingent on the relations between their effects - such as reproduction - and their ability to be narrated as lively, an ability that does not simply reside in the human narrators. In this sense, alife organisms and humans form an extended phenotype of each other, with rhetorical softwares serving as the ribotypic translation apparatus that enables this operation of alife code on human bodies and vice versa, the becoming-silicon of flesh, the becoming -flesh of silicon.21
And as with the other levels of translation , one simply cannot tell in advance if a given RTYPE/PTYPE interaction will succeed in yielding organisms that will achieve actualized success as lively. Each rhetorical software or ribotype must be run - and the alife organisms' "lives", as actual lives, are at stake. It is only in practice - what befalls the GTYPE and is contingent virtual vitality - that the actualized vitality of the alife organism can emerge. Indeed, in some sense it is only in the future that such liveliness can occur, for each practice encounters the news that any formal definition of life is yet to come.
Perhaps there is good reason for the apparently irreducible contingency of the GTYPE -RTYPE -PTYPE interaction. John Von Neumann, polymath propagator of the theory of self-reproducing automata, describes complexity as being more difficult to describe than to practice:
There is a good deal in formal logics to indicate that the description of the functions of an automaton is simpler than the automaton itself, as long as the automaton is not very complicated, but that when you get to high complications, the actual object is simpler than the literary description.(italics mine)22
However one characterizes the life effect, it is certainly "complicated." Thus the description or translation of the liveliness of artificial life is perhaps more complex than the automata of alife themselves. Like the joke I mentioned above, it is perhaps simpler to practice or "grow" alife than it is to describe it. Truly an abductive enterprise, alife continually seeks confirmation in a practice that is yet to come - the translation of alife as lively, and an understanding of the formal nature of life, life-as-we-know-it within the context of life-as-it-could-be.
Indeed, in some sense that is yet to be articulated, alife's abduction lives up to its status as a pun: By substituting the synthesis of artificial organisms for the arrival of extraterrestrial ones, alife also substitutes one vision of being overtaken by the future - one that seems to be a distinctly second choice - for another. Tired of waiting, alifers carry out their own abduction, an abduction of and on the earth. Tom Ray, creator of the Tierra artificial life program, makes my point implicitly but concisely:
And just as evolution on other planets is not a model of life on Earth,
nor is natural evolution in the digital medium.
Here Ray, of course, begs the very inquiry that alife pursues, the space of possible biologies. While it seems unlikely that the extraordinarily contingent character of terrestrial "life" would be replicated in other ecologies, it remains to be seen, in a possible, abductive future, whether or not terrestrial evolution would share sufficient features with an extraterrestrial process to be "modeled" by other, not yet evident, biologies. This move - the assumption of evolution on other planets - is consistently used to "bootstrap" silicon into contention as a viable biological substrate. Consider the following thought experiment, again from Ray:
Imagine that we are robots. We are made out of metal, and our brains are composed of large scale integrated circuits made of silicon or some other semi-conductor. Imagine further, that we have no experience of carbon based life. We have never seen it, never heard of it, nor ever contemplated it. Now suppose a robot enters the scene with a flask containing methane, ammonia, hydrogen, water and a few dissolved minerals. . .
The effect of this thought experiment, of course, is to establish the sheer contingency of the form - carbon based- that "life" has taken. The "imagine an extraterrestrial" ( recall Langton's claim that silicon is not of the Earth: Artificial life is "made out of different stuff than the life that has evolved here on Earth") form of the thought experiment is a familiar enough device, one used to estrange the implicit characteristics of a situation and make them explicit. The difference here is that Ray actually asks us to imagine that "we" are made of silicon, rather than using some hypothetical extraterrestrial perspective to estrange our own. In this sense, Ray assumes apriori the very conflation between life and silicon that alife attempts to carry out. More remarkable still, Ray actually identifies with the perspective of the silicon subjects. After some of the robot engineers scoff at the idea of carbon based information processors, Ray agrees:
From our organo-centric perspective the robot engineers might seem naive, but in fact I think they are correct. Carbon chemistry is a lousy medium for information processing. Yet the evolutionary process embodies such a powerful drive to generate information processing systems, that it was able to rig up carbon based contraptions for processing information, capable of generating the beauty and complexity of the human mind. What might such a powerful force for information processing do in a medium designed for that purpose in the first place? It is likely to arrive more quickly at sophisticated information processes than evolution in carbon chemistry, and would likely achieve comparable functionality with a greater economy of form and process. Evolution is a process that explores the possibilities inherent in the medium.
As in Langton's claim above - that other substrates are the true subject matter of biology - Ray goes beyond the mere claim that silicon is a possible substrate to the claim that it is a superior one. This notion, of course, is warranted by the conflation of "information processing" with "life", a claim that Artificial Life inquires into rather than establishes. Carbon, that grand error, can be sloughed off, as life puts on the new flesh, silicon. Abducted, alife lives off the future, a future of "evolution on other planets", a future where silicon effects, rather than promises, life.23
Literary Ribotypes
Not all creatures can be rendered equally visible, narratable and therefore abductable, so some rhetorical tactics would seem to be more successful than others in the evolving ribotype of alife. In the literary phylum, authors like Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs have generated remarkable rhetorical effects of vitality. Dick, the speed typing author of over 36 novels and several volumes of short stories, describes "vugs", a Titanian, silicon based life form that inhabits his 1963 novel Game Players of Titan.
They were a silicon based life form, rather than carbon-based; their cycle was slow, and involved methane rather than oxygen as the metabolic catalyst. And they were bisexual..."Poke it, " Bill Calumine said to Jack Blau. With the vug-stick, Jack prodded the jelly-like cytoplasm of the vug. "Go home," he told it sharply.24
Dick's figuration of the in silico creature quickly overtakes the comfortable distance established between the stick wielding humans and the amorphous blobs from Titan. Telepathic, Vugs render the distinction between the interiority of a human and its "outside" undecideable, as the boundaries of human identity become as fluid as the physical outline of the Vug. Before long, both the characters in and the readers of Dick's novel find themselves "surrounded."
As he sat on the edge of the bed removing his clothes he found something, a match folder under the lamp by the bed and examined it. . . On the match folder, in his own hand penciled words: WE ARE ENTIRELY SURROUNDED BY BUGS RUGS VUGS.25
Crucial to the effect garnered here - one might call it panic - is the vehicle of the vug knowledge. Writing, that allegedly stable reservoir of memory, becomes the vector not of certainty but of possibility. The reception of a message to oneself becomes the occasion not just for recall but for the disturbance of recollection. For Dick's character, Pete Garden, could not remember writing such a note:
I wonder when I wrote that? In the bar? On the way home? Probably when I first figured it out, when I was talking with Dr. Philipson.
By disturbing both the interiority of his characters - through telepathy, you're thinking - and the interiority of his reader - through the suggestion that his writing, too, may contain a strange message, one so inarticulable that one must try out different bonsonants, ronsonants, consonants - Dick dislocates the vitality of the vug and distributes it across other substrates. The very existence of a silicon life form, of course, immediately leaves us, possibly, "surrounded", but Dick's play on the simulatable character of life and the incessant movement of writing implicates both his characters and his readers in a strangely paranoid world where anything, even a book, could be alive.26
This dislocation of vitality from its "home", carbon, instills many of Dick's novels with this uncanny sense of being "surrounded" by vitality. In Radio Free Albemuth, a novel found with Dick's papers after his 1982 death and therefore read only in Dick's future, Nicholas Brady receives a visit from his future self:
He had the impression that the figure, himself, had come back from the future, perhaps from a point vastly far ahead, to make sure that he, his prior self was doing okay at a critical time in his life. The impression was distinct and strong and he could not rid himself of it.27
This unforgettable memory of the future seemed primarily concerned with one thing: that the universe is itself alive. Having encountered VALIS - the Vast Living Intelligent System - Brady was now plugged in to the enormous vitality of the "void."
By now I knew what had happened to me; for reasons I did not understand, I had become plugged into an intergalactic communications network, and I gazed up trying to locate it, although most likely locating it was impossible.28
Crucial to Dick's formulation is the notion that such vitality cannot be "located." Beyond the boundaries of any given organism - whether human, vug, or the Universe itself - vitality is characterized by its excess, a surplus that renders the desire to "locate" the territory of vitality difficult if not impossible. Only violence - the repetitive prodding of the Vug stick - can connect the flowing membrane of life to its alleged container, "home", and the network can be "plugged into" but not located, as each node leads to another in the distributed effect Dick renders as VALIS, an artificial but living god.
So too does much of alife create this sense of dislocation, as the incessant vitality , like the Eveready battery bunny , goes "on and on", everywhere. Indeed, as I have noted elsewhere, the practice of alife seems to be involved in the desire for transcendence, the desire to be "above everywhere", a position from which one can articulate, finally, the formal characteristics of life in this moment of its dislocation. 29 But the excessive character of alife is effected in more than a simply transcendental fashion; the pesky vitality periodically invades the "identity" of the user, that wetware charmed by the moof, the sea lettuce, the mutating search urchin. In Simlife, for example, the tutorial bundled with the package implores the user to "write your name in seeds." As a classic inoculation of subjectivity - the very insemination of the name -nothing would seem more masterful and transcendental than this act of self replication. And yet, plunged into the virtual ecology of simlife, the seeds sprout, grow, die, and quickly overtake the morphology of the name. Growing in all directions at once, one's SimIdentity becomes Moof, Sea Lettuce, whatever avatar has charmed the user, and the pixel life goes on and on. No longer a memory device for subjectivity, the writing of the name becomes an excessive growth.
Still, as with Dick's novels, such vitality exists within a frame: the virtual ecology of the computer. If, after a time, the reader of Philip K Dick's novels slowly remembers the memorializing capacities of writing, so too does silicon's vitality remain confined, primarily, to the post vital window that it operates in. If the operation of abduction - the encounter with an alien, unprecedented future - makes the appearance of in silico organisms possibly ubiquitous in the distributed network of contemporary "life", what insures the autonomy and isolation of the vital silicon creature in the context of its leaky legacy of excess?
Life is for Fetuses or, Insane in the Membrane
A universe comes into being when space is severed into two. A unity is defined. The description, invention and manipulation of unities is at the base of all scientific inquiry.30
Life itself, a kind of technoscientific deity, may be what is virtually pregnant.31
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, in their 1973 text "Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living", offer a general theory of living systems that would characterize the specificity of vital systems in terms of their autonomy. In this respect, Maturana and Varela are placed firmly within an Aristotelian tradition that saw organisms as wholes mobilized by their purpose or "telos", but with a difference: the "purpose" of an organism is autonomy itself.
This formulation of a theory of biological systems allows one to dispense with the classical category of teleology, but perhaps more crucially it also allows for the evaporation of the distinction between living systems and machines. In the place of this distinction - one based, perhaps, on some vitalist trace in biology - Maturana and Varela generate the difference between "autopoietic" and "allopoietic" machines. Autopoietic machines work on themselves, as it were, generating their identity as an effect of their ongoing self organization:
an autopoietic machine is a machine organized ( defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produce the components which :(i) through their interactions and transformations continuously generate and realize the network of processes ( relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it as a concrete unity in the space in which they ( the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization of such a network. ( 78-79)
Such a lengthy and tangled definition reminds us of Von Neumann's observation cited above: that an event as complex as a living system is easier to achieve than to describe. Still, Maturana and Varela's definition has serious influence within certain strands of artificial life, so its rhetorical management of this complex problem - the very definition and borders of living systems - is crucial to an understanding of the investment of the interior of autonomous alife organisms with "life."
On the one hand, it would seem obvious that Maturana and Varela's arguments enable artificial life. By decoupling autopoiesis from its usual lodging, organisms, autopoiesis makes possible the dislodging of life from any "organic" location whatsoever. It is in this sense that Maturana and Varela's work resonates with the news that living systems are primarily informatic. They seek to situate the autopoietic effect within a larger integrated process rather than confining it to its network of molecular effects, even as they refuse the claim that living systems can be characterized as operations of coding.32
This dislodging of life via autopoiesis, then, continued the erosion of the machine/organism distinction that was wrought by the ascendance of the post vital understanding of living systems. Unlike the distributed character of networked life, whose vitality is tied to the possibility of a contingent outside with which each component could connect, Maturana and Varela's vision emphasizes the autonomy and closure of the autopoietic system. If the post vital understanding of life emphasizes connection - as in Stuart Kauffman's boolean nets, where nodes garner vitality and order through relation to multiple, other nodes - then the cybernetic argument of Maturana and Varela render life as an interiority, one constantly making itself as a self.
This notion of the interiority that inheres in autopoietic systems maps logically onto Maturana and Varela's claim that autopoiesis is "necessary and sufficient for the occurrence of all biological phenomena." At the core of this argument is the historicity of the concept of life. Life, Michel Foucault has argued, comes into existence only in the 19th century, when organisms were invested with the secret force of vitality in terms of a "sovereign vanishing point within the organism." More than a mere collection of living things, the biological gaze looked at life itself, a force that was paradoxically invisible, buried within the organism but revelatory in its effects. "The experience of life is thus posited as the most general law of beings, the revelation of that primitive force on the basis of which they are."33 Thus the necessary and sufficient status accorded autopoiesis retains the historical sovereignty and interiority of life- it depends only on itself - even as Maturana and Varela seek to offer a theory of living organizations., a theory that stresses the relentlessly relational character of living systems .
This self contained logical character of the autopoietic system - as necessary and sufficient - marks the topological map of the living system as well. "In the beginning", to paraphrase the quote with which I began this section, "was the inside and the outside." The authors begin with this distinction, warranted by their emphasis on "autonomy", what they deem to be "so obviously an essential feature of living systems."34 For a distinction that possesses so much self-evidence, the claim for the autonomy of the autopoietic system - that process of self organization that emerges between the inside and the outside - poses many problems for Maturana and Varela. Even as they attempt to demarcate the distinctive qualities of living systems, they find themselves unable to either confirm or deny the difference between social organizations and biological ones. Faced with what they see as the ethical problems that inhere in the answer to such a question, problems they deem to be the problems of the future, Maturana and Varela defer the answer to this question to the future itself:
In fact no position or view that has any relevance in the domain of human relations can be deemed free from ethical and political implications...This responsibility we are ready to take, yet since we- Maturana and Varela - do not fully agree on an answer to the question...we have decided to postpone this discussion.35
That is, Maturana and Varela cannot agree on the status of the following question: Are social organizations inside or outside the purview of biological laws? The decision not to decide, to postpone or defer, allegorizes the futural character of the very membrane between inside and outside, the autonomy machine, that Maturana and Varela deploy. Only retroactively - i.e., in the future - is the distinction between inside and outside self-evident. Far from obvious, the mobius space of inside and outside are sites of indeterminacy and undecideability that emerge in the process of living systems. The very autonomy of them - Maturana and Varela - is threatened by the force of the problem: they cannot choose not to decide about the future, ethical problems posed by the theory of autopoiesis they offer.36Even on Maturana and Varela's own terms, such a topological distinction poses a cognitive problem that "has to do with the capacity of the observer to recognize the relations that define the system as a unity, and with his capacity to distinguish the boundaries which delimit the unity in the space in which it is realized."37
Despite ( or perhaps because of) its conceptual trouble, the localization of life rendered by the theory of autopoiesis does much to ensure the confinement of artificial life in its window. For with its clear, if troubled, exposition of the claim that autonomy is the fundamental life "behavior", they clearly enable the continuation of the classical claim for the interiority of organisms even as the life effect is distributed across networks.
By insuring such a clear demarcation between the inside and outside of the living system, Maturana and Varela's argument parallels the historical comportment of the fetus as an entity distinct from its mother's body. As scholars such as Susan Squier, Barbara Duden, Karen Newman, Val Hartouni and Donna Haraway have argued, the fetus was "born" as a distinct entity through rhetorical and visual techniques that severed it from the maternal body and invested it with "life" and subjectivity. Both the rhetorics of "choice" and "pro-life", Newman argues, emerge out of a discourse full of rights laden bodies, individuals in direct conflict that paradoxically dwell in the same corporeality. While Newman overlooks the historical transformations of "life" in the period that she is analyzing, she carefully documents the persistent, historical occlusion of the maternal body and the emergence of the fetus, an emergence that functions through the attribution of interiority to an entity which is, paradoxically, inside the invisible maternal body.
Donna Haraway, in "The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order", highlights the particularly odd status of such a fetus at a moment when life has been dislocated. Haraway offers multiple readings of a cartoon that she dubs "Virtual Speculum", which features
a female nude...in the position of Adam, whose hand is extended to the creative interface with not God the Father but a keyboard for a computer whose display screen shows the global digital fetus in its amniotic sac.38
Among Haraway's proliferating readings, she argues that the digital fetus is "literally..somehow in the computer" and thus "more connected to downloading than birth or abortion...the on-screen fetus is an artificial life form."39 The character of such a life form, of course, is precisely the topic of this essay, so I will close with some supplemental observations on the Virtual Speculum.
In Haraway's formulation of the "fetus in cyberspace", the topological comportment of life as outlined by Maturana and Varela returns; life is conceptually or "virtually pregnant" - disturbed at its border between "inside" and "outside", a fetus "in" a non-space, life has missed its (historical) period. The conundrum posed by Virtual Speculum is literally: where is life? Its "source" appears to be the gleaming screen of the workstation, as capital transforms more than the global markets via the new technologies of pixel, keyboard and, perhaps, network. But such a reading immediately overlooks the corporeal connection of the female nude, whose hand touches the keypad, whose digits, perhaps, experience the pain of labor via carpal tunnel syndrome. Thus the "digital" fetus, awash in amniotic and semiotic fluid, exemplifies the persistent exteriority of "life" in living systems. Impossible to locate, the life effect occupies a mobius body, a rhizome that traverses the interiority of the screen and its outside. As a membrane, the screen marks less a clean boundary than a multiplicity. Difficult to narrate - which is before, which after? - such a multiplicity fosters the implosion of the virtual and the actual even as it highlights an odd morphology of life whose vanishing point is a network rather than an organism.
The sheer alterity of this multiplicity - the becoming flesh of silicon, the becoming silicon of flesh - seems to foster an abduction, one that forestalls the difference of the future by substituting "for a complicated tangle of predicates attached to one subject, a single conception", i.e. life. Newman describes this demand as a "referential panic, a need for realist images" that would render the strange new configurations of technoscience and "life" consumable and narratable.
"Panic", though, is itself a multiplicity, the mark of the exuberance of Pan, that trickster. Goat-Man, he "presided over flocks", multiplicities, "he was considered an impersonation of Nature." Erupting with "groundless terror", our panic about life and its "simulations" disciplines but also dislocates: without ground, life is nothing but connection. A remarkable performative, "Panic!" installs a multiplicity: crowds, markets suddenly encounter their own alterity. Panic installs a multiplicity not because of some lack, some inability to be autonomous. Instead, it marks the excessive exteriority that flows through each membrane: individual/community, fetus/mother, life/machine. Panic emerges when life becomes communicable, as each boundary now is at risk. Yes, Panic is quite becoming.
1Ghost of Chance, p. 3
2 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema2: The Time Image,p.266
3Jacob, Francois. The Logic of Life, p. 299.
4Bretton Woods, the agreement that ended the orientation of the world currency markets on the gold standard, would mark a comparable dislocation of economic value.
5My argument that scientists have recently begun interfacing with organisms as informational constructs, of course, does not rule out the possibility and the probability that organisms have always already been, in part, such constructs. My point is, rather, that such an interface has only been made visible and actual via the rhetorics and practices of late 20th century biology. These rhetorics and practices, therefore, disciplined and comported organisms in away that made the informatic character of life available to the scientific register. In Deleuze and Guattari's locution, technoscience operates with "functives" that discipline the "plane of consistency."
6 Collected Papers, volume 2, p.270
7An iteration of the most famous example of the syllogism will, I hope, help explicate Peirce's discussion.
All men are mortal. (Major Premise)
Socrates is a man. (Minor Premise)
Therefore, Socrates is mortal. ( Conclusion)
The validity of the conclusion in syllogistic reasoning depends upon the validity of the premises. In this instance, the major premise emerges out of the persistent and habitual encounter with death, while the minor premise becomes debatable in the light of Socrates' behavior as a "gadfly."
In t
8p. 387, volume 2.
9Alife, p. 33
10Volume 2, paragraph 642
11p.2, alife
12alifeI, p. 24
13p. 23, alife I
14Deleuze and Guattari have written of the orchid's "imaging" of the wasp as an example of a rhizomatic relation.The wasp, they argue, is an element in the reproductive system of the orchid, and as such is part of the orchid's morphology., its becoming-wasp, the wasp's becoming-orchid.
The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of the wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterretorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterretorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome.14
Darwin, by contrast, was convinced that insects must , as autonomous organisms, derive some material benefit from the pollination practice, such as nectar, while Sprengel posited the existence of what he called "Sheinsaftblumen," " or sham-nectar producers; he believes that these plants exist by an organized system of deception, for he well knew that the visits of insects were indispensable for their fertilization. But when we reflect on the incalculable number of the pollen-masses attached to their proboscides, that the same insects visit a large number of flowers, we can hardly believe in so gigantic an imposture." p. 25, , Various Contrivances by which orchids are Fertilized, volume 17 The Works of Charles Darwin. ( The Pickering Masters)
15schrodinger
16actual/virtual distinction from Deleuze and Guattari.What is Philosophy?
17 p. 157
18Grosz, Elizabeth. "Thinking the New"
19Compare, for example, the status of alife organisms with other boundary troubling "life" forms. Viruses's status as a life form - is it alive or is it? - has no effect on its ability to propagate. By contrast, the success of alife organisms are tied to the replicability, if not description, of the intensely affective responses to alife creatures. These affects are replicated, in part, by rhetorical softwares that comport alife "as" life, and which narrate the liveliness of the creatures to ourselves or others. These narratives render us as what Simon Scaffer and Stephen Shapin might characterize as virtual witnesses to actualized life.
20Consider, for example, alife researcher Chris Langton's close encounter of a silicon kind, as told by Kevin Kelley: "Langton remembered working alone late one night and suddenly feeling the presence of someone, something alive in the room, staring at him. He looked up an on the screen of Life he saw an amazing pattern of self replicating cells. A few minutes later he felt the presence again. He looked up again and saw that the pattern had died. He suddenly felt that the pattern had been alive - alive and as real as mold on an agar plate - but on a computer screen instead. The bombastic idea that perhaps a computer program could capture life sprouted in Langton's mind."p. 344, Out of Control. Note, of course, the creepy vitality of ideas of life that themselves "sprout." See also Pier Luigi Luisi's "Defining the Transition to Life" in Varela and Stein's Thinking About Biology. Luisi writes of the affective charge carried by the claim for the synthesis of vitality: "the self replicating bounded structures ... should be considered as minimal synthetic life. Such a statement may possess an unappealing flavor, but I believe one should not be afraid of it. This feeling of unappealingness probably arises for pyschological reasons, but it should not cloud the scientific issue." p. 35. I would, of course, argue that the scientific issue cannot be extricated from this affective response.
21Richard Dawkins defines his notion of the extended phenotype, where gene action is not confined to the interior of sovereign bodies, in terms of the following "central theorem": " An animal's behavior tends to maximize the survival of the genes "for" that behavior, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it." p. 233The Extended Phenotype. In the case of alife creatures, then, the behavior in question is "life" and, and the maximization of the survival and propagation of this behavior is carried out, actualized, by humans. And just as the reproduction of flowering plants depend on the "imaging" of insect pollinators, so too does the actualization of alife depend upon an imaging of vitality for its human propagators. Dawkins discusses a fascinating example of anelid worms that simulated, as a group, anenomes. My example here takes the notion one step further, one where the very life of the organism is itself simulated.
22von Neumann, John. Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, edited and completed by Arthur W. Burks. p. 47. Remarkably, this treatise was not produced solely by von Neumann him"self." Arthur Burks - who is also the editor of several volumes of Charles Sanders Peirce's selected papers - worked with the wire recorders that had preserved von Neumann's speech and rendered it into text.
23( Langton on copernicus)
24p. 6, Game Players of Titan.
25IBID, P. 116.
26Phaedrus on writing
27Radio Free Albemuth, pps. 10-11
28idbid., p. 110.
29On Beyond Living:Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences.
30Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition:The Realization of the Living
31Haraway, Donna Modest Witness, p. 186.
32Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition:The Realization of the Living, p. 102
33Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things, p. 278
34Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition:The Realization of the Living,p. 73
35Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition:The Realization of the Living,p. 118.
36Instructive in this regard is the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, for autonomous "subject" is constituted as the continual encounter with alterity, an encounter that renders it topologically not as a unity but as a klein bottle:"Subjectivity realizes these impossible exigencies - the astonishing feat of containing more than it is possible to contain." Totality and Infinity, p. 27.
37Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition:The Realization of the Living,p. 108.
38Modest Witness, p. 176
39Ibid, p. 186.