Richard Doyle - All Rights Reserved
rmd12@psu.edu
(Movement 1)
"Life" has been moving. The very possibility of articulating a conference in the name of vitality and its signifiers, "Vital Signs", marks the redistribution that I will attempt to discuss here: Formerly attributed to the cyborg assemblage of organism and machine, announced by the tell tale metronomic, metonymic, *cybernetic* beep and the flashing of a pixel on its screen, "Vital Signs" now alludes to the dense textuality at play in the life sciences, a textuality in which "life" chiasmatically implodes into "information", and signs themselves code and decode their way to vitality. No longer distributed among the machine/organism nexus, "vital signs" now seem to refer to the sovereign and self referential status of the timeless immortality of Deoxyribonucleic Acid. Between DNA and its effects, we have the perfect geometry of the arrow, a diagrammatic vector that at once marks out and erases the place of the organism, the body.
Much work has been done documenting this movement, and the elisions, occlusions and forgettings that have enabled it. Susan Oyama, Evelyn Fox Keller, Richard Lewontin, Donna Haraway and others have made crucial and timely interventions in the contemporary discourse on the life sciences, highlighting the historicity, contingencies and blindnesses at play in the bootstrapping of hegemonic molecular biology. My own work has focused on the rhetorical transformations that have made possible a "post vital" biology, a discipline concerned not so much with organisms as with the relations of molecules and their effects.1
But of course- and this is one of the main insights of much recent inquiry into technoscience - this is not simply a technoscientific event. If we have focused our work on the extra-scientific components at play in technoscientific practice, contemporary transformations of the body that resonate through science/fiction have an equally urgent purchase on our research. In this essay, I want to map out the peculiar and sometimes spectacular transformations of corporeality occurring at two such aleatory sites: Simlife, a popular artificial life program by the Maxis corporation, and that unlikely futures market in bodies, cryonics. Both cryonics and artificial life are intimately bound up with the tortuous and twisted relations emerging out of the impossibility of the nature/culture opposition. Indeed, in some sense both artificial life and cryonics are these relations. Artificial life, of course, emerges from our arrow: the conflation of life and information makes it possible. In that light, cryonics might be seen as an odd vestige of the old corporeality, where the body, like the buggy whip. persists long after it is "needed." Such a judgment, I will argue, forgets the retooled nature of the post vital body; it is not lost or forgotten so much as in transit, becoming code.
In mapping these sites, I hope to highlight the possibilities for lines of flight, political and otherwise, in the emerging nexus of bodies and machines that I will outline here. Stolen from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "lines of flight" produce effects that are, as we used to say, something else, disjunctive to contemporary formations of power knowledge. For although the perfect geometry of the arrow, the informational vector that, for much of hegemonic molecular biology, leads directly from DNA to "US" without pausing for difference, we must not forget the possibility that the arrow makes possible a movement elsewhere, what Donna Haraway has characterized as thinking technoscience, otherwise.
(Movement 2)
Simflesh, Simbones: At Play in the Artificial Life Phenotype
From the Transcendental Screen to Planes of Immanence
It's in the laboratories where genetic fantasies are the last avatar of the western dream, the ultimate point of this double and dangerous ambition: purity of choice and descendence. Jacques Attali.
He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming down the fibre optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. Snowcrash
As an "avatar" of the western dream, genetic engineering and its attendant fantasies are not merely the natural outcome of a scientific and cultural polymerase chain reaction that began sometime in the 1970's, although that would be a fine metaphor to pursue.2 Instead, biotechnology and its signs join together as an avatar, a virtual site of interaction where nucleic acids, science fictions, softwares, the New York Times and some persistent dreams of the "West" flash on and off in a complex morphology of the "Gene" or "DNA." This morphology itself is a dynamic one, an interactive, animated narrative of technoscience and culture that, like the molecules it describes and inscribes, must be seen to be complexly and even rhizomatically in play.3 Here the distinctions between life and information, lab and living room, essay and rant, scientific and popular culture implode, collide in a space "beyond" the computer screen. No longer pressing our collective noses up against the glass or mirror of nature, we now find that we have passed through to another side, one where the oppositions between nature and culture collapse and collide in a post vital matrix of work/play/simulation. George Wald, as quoted by J.D. Bernal in 1967, sums up an isomorphic crossover, one triggered by research into the origin of life:
We have been told so often and on such tremendous authority as to seem to put it beyond question, that the essence of things must remain forever hidden from us; that we must stand forever outside nature, like children with their noses pressed against the glass, able to look in, but unable to enter. This concept of our origins encourages another view of the matter. We are not looking into the universe from the outside. We are looking at it from inside. Its history is our history; its stuff, our stuff. From that realization we can take some assurance that what we see is real. 4
This movement from the "outside" to the "inside" is instructive. Whereas much traditional scientific subjectivity describes a scientific gaze as cleft from its object, everywhere and nowhere, hovering above the earth , Wald articulates a complicit empiricism, one that takes solace in the irreducibly situated character of scientific knowledge production. Of course, it is this very solace that needs to be marked here, the metaphysical comfort derived from the proprietary identification of "its stuff" as "our stuff." In this move of "assurance", the world is once again rendered as a mere resource for humans, "us", once again reinscribing the transcendental position of the human "on" the earth.
At the same time, Wald's move - the transformation of the human/nature opposition into a membrane of complicity - can be connected up with Deleuze and Guattari's notions of the "Plane of Transcendence" and the "Plane of Consistency." "The Plane of Consistency" maps out the connections and confusions that enable this movement from the outside to the inside; It is an event that Deleuze and Guattari characterize as a movement of immanence. Here,
There is no structure, any more than there is genesis. There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds....Nothing subjectifies, but haecceities form according to compositions of nonsubjectified powers or affects...We therefore call it a plane of Nature, although nature has nothing to do with it, since on this plane there is no distinction between the natural and the artificial. 5
Like Wald's notion above, Deleuze and Guattari's figuration here highlights the relation between the natural and human world as one of "composition", a mixture of speeds and matter that refuse the organizational binary of artificial/natural; the plane of consistency is that which makes possible the appearance of the artificial, the natural. Rather than an axis that demarcates the world into the nature/culture or human/inhuman dialectic, the plane of consistency maps the irreducible particularity ( "Haecceities") of that strange mixture, the world. As such, the plane of consistency maps more of a "polyverse" than a universe, one composed of differences more than unities.6
Since it is composed of bundles of difference, the plane of consistency is not simply "our stuff." Propriety is an artifact not of immanence and consistency, but of transcendence and organization. Thus the subjectless yet individual space of the plane of consistency is constantly in danger of a crash into organization:
The plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth. 7
It is within this double formation -an encounter with an immanence prior to and constitutive of subjectivity, if not individuation, that is continually interrupted and stratified by transcendence- that I wish to map the "outside/inside" movement announced by Wald. For although "stuff", in all its particularity and alterity, is ultimately put under arrest on the plane of transcendence via the sign of "our" and its network of propriety and property practices, Wald's description serves as more than an occasion for a deconstruction of the commodification of the world. It offers a encounter with the radical complicity between the individuated forms of "us" and "stuff." It offers a holism that is not an organicism, a massive machine of connection and becoming that transforms the Earth into something other than a battleground for nature/culture. It situates "us", it situates "stuff."
In the context of the contemporary life sciences, where biology's new reagent is information, Wald's glass,which serves as a quasi plane of consistency that takes in the organic and the artificial, the "universe" and "us", becomes a screen. Artificial life, the synthesis of living organisms in software and robotics, marks a potent and uncertain node in this networked reshuffling of the organic and the inorganic, real and artificial. By looking to the computer screen as a vantage point from which to construct a "universal biology" - not merely life as it is, but "life as it could be" - artificial life indexes the seismic rhetorical shifts underway in the contemporary life sciences.8 It also maps the intermittent movement of Life, Nature and Co. to the screen, a movement of location that reinscribes the transcendental valence of "life" and "nature" even as our simulation practices shatter, through an incessant doubling, the priority and sovereignty of vitality and nature. This recoronation of life and nature works precisely to the extent that technoscientific practices occlude their conditions of possibility, other practices on all sides of the screen.9
But if it is sometimes difficult to tell which side of the screen technoscientific practices are on, it is equally difficult to extricate artificial life techniques from lay and popular discourses that suffuse them. Networked with more than other computers, connected to more than disk drives and Web Sites, the screen that so uncertainly conjoins and divides the organic and the inorganic is itself a mere polyp in the reef of material strategies that makes possible this new distribution of vitality. While not contesting the claims of artificial life in the name of the natural or the organic, I do want to introduce a hesitation into the discourse of transcendentality that accompanies and enables artificial life, a site where the screen becomes a plane of organization and transcendence, hovering over the world of actuality, defining if not determining our knowledge of "life.". Computer Scientist David Gelernter `s notion of the computer screen as "topsite" in Mirror Worlds: The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How it Will Happen and What it Will Mean typifies the rhetorical operation that converts the screen into a plane of transcendence.
topsight is what comes from a far-overhead vantage point, from a bird's eye view that reveals the whole - the big picture; how the parts fit together.10
Topsite is the spatial version of technoscientific monotheism, its plane of transcendence; if only we could achieve that one perspective with which to view the "whole." This operational, panoptic rhetoric must itself be seen to be a part of the economy of inscriptions I will trace out, as it finds its plausibility within a world of implosion described by Gelernter as
an event that will happen someday soon: You will look into a computer screen and see reality....When you switch one on, you turn the world (like an old sweater) inside out. You stuff the huge multi-institutional ratwork that encompasses you into a genie bottle on your desk. You can see over, under and through it. You can see deeply into it. A bottled institution cannot intimidate, confound or ignore its members; they dominate it....People will stop looking at their computer screens and start gazing into them.11
Once again, the world becomes "our stuff." Articulated as a static space of domination, the connections of "world" and "us" operate only in one direction. But such a topological reduction, wherein human beings are somehow exterior to the objects of their gaze, is clearly impossible: one need not be a Derridean to agree that such a quest for spatial temporal closure is not just unlikely, but impossible. For obviously, "reality" includes, but is not limited to, our interaction with it, and Gelernter's masterful gaze would need to include a small window that featured the back of his head in front of the screen, and inside that window we would need another that featured the back of the device that represented his head, and so on.... This is not simply a philosophical quandary;the movement of the real to the screen has profoundly altered our practices of war, our notions of medicine, and our theoretical understanding of life, forming a feedback loop with the object that is allegedly "contained" within the screen. Thus I would like to argue for the screen otherwise: Conceived as a space of becoming, one that suffuses humans as much as it "contains" the world, the computer screen and its beyond becomes some other topology, one I'll provisionally call the mobius body. Neither inside nor outside the computer network or its other, "the world", the mobius body is the material, corporeal skin of contemporary transformations of power-knowledge.
Appropriately enough, my first articulation of the mobius body involves a mouse. Brian Rotman has pointed out that the mouse, as an interface, provides us with a metonym for the project of rendering the body, virtually. The mouse is the becoming virtual of the finger, the finger's avatar on the other side of the screen. As such it can be described within the McLuhanite rhetorics of prosthesis: the mouse is an extension of the finger "into" electronic space. And yet that "extension" also troubles the status of the finger, dislocating it, distributing it both inside and outside of the computer screen.12
Another mouse allows us to flesh out this articulation of the mobius body. Bio Medic Data Systems announces the arrival of the mobius mouse in a recent advertisement for its Electronic Laboratory Animal Monitoring System (ELAMS&tm; )."We keep lab animals from having an identify complex" could be read in at least two ways. On the one hand, it announces the practices of precision and exactitude that compose the contemporary life sciences, practices which are in this instance techniques of surveillance. Thus the ability of ELAMS&tm; to prevent "an identity complex" testifies to the massive disciplining of the mouse that goes on in the lab: ELAMS&tm; allows the user to know where and how any particular mouse is, "who" it is in some sense. There will be no doubt about who this mouse is;the ELAMS&tm; allows the mouse to become code.
It can link any animal to any computer database, allowing you to individualize your animal using your study number. You can even characterize them with clinical observation codes. . .Simply put, it replaces the complexities and inaccuracies of toe clipping, ear tagging and tattooing with a foolproof, fast and economical method of positive identification.
Thus the ELAMS replaces the practices of the body - surveillance tactics of the toe, ear and skin - with the operations of coding. The mouse as on object of study is "characterize(d)", transformed into a character, a diagram, an inscription.
And yet the visuals of the Biomedic ad remind us of another reading. The mouse/computer relation is rendered as a journey, a movement that traverses both sides of the screen. More than a clean cybernetic deletion or replacement of the body, the screen marks a moment in a becoming, the becoming code of the mouse. As such it is not pure code; no implosion of the mouse and code is complete. Rather, the mouse body is rendered as a complex, an assemblage of corporeality and virtuality that traverse both. The ad renders the mobius body over time, frozen into a single frame - on both sides of the screen at once, the mouse pictorially narrates a spatial organization of the machine/body relation as a journey over time. This sense of the relations that compose the mouse as a scientific object disturbs the easy transcendental position of the human ( in this case, the reader) placed in front the screen. For if the mouse traverses both "sides" of the screen, rides on, embodies a mobius strip of an interface, then humans get dislocated from topsite, a simple looking down on the mouse, and implicated in the practice of becoming code.
It is clear that the sense of complicity such a reading fosters is itself disciplined out of most contemporary representations of technoscience ; technoscience is an autonomy machine. The transcendental position of the scientist is constantly reinscribed: "Identification is who we are", announces Biomedic Data Technologies. Hence my intervention here: Keeping the plane of consistency in movement, in flight, I want to highlight the rhetorical moves that redeploy transcendence and subjectivity onto the corporeal and rhetorical mixture of connection, plane of consistency, that makes up the mobius body of alife.
From the Laboratory to the Living Room: Getting into the Sim
Greetings Electronic Biologist! Simlife registration card.
To exemplify the ways that the "gene" has been figured within this implosion of "life" and "information", "nature" and "culture", I click first on a software avatar called "Simlife: The Genetic Playground." Simlife, a software package available for both PC and Macintosh platforms, provides us with an artifact and a toy which we can treat as a map of the complex and interactive inscriptions which suffuse the "gene" in popular and scientific culture. Released by the Maxis Corporation in 1992, Simlife is an artificial life program, a "game, a toy and an experimental tool to learn about life, real and artificial." The package consists of a registration card (quoted above), a manual, a lab book for recording your Simlife experiments, and a couple of disks that go into the computer. This extraordinary program offers users the ability to be a virtual genetic engineer, as Simlife provides an environment for the cultivation, nourishment and breeding of artificial organisms, what we might call cybernetic sea monkeys. Here I will offer a brief analysis of both the documentation and the interactions available to the electronic biologist, the one who has realized along with Harvard molecular biologist Walter Gilbert that biology's new reagent is information.
Already, the hard copy documentation bundled with Simlife announces an implosion: Rhinoheaded tigers, ostrich giraffes and a toucan lizard crowd the environment of the cover, eyeballing the reader in a reversal of the gaze to come, a gaming gaze that will look into the screen of a computer and not at it. With the cover, Simlife has already begun its tutorial: look into our chimeric eyes. Simlife, after all, is itself a chimerical beast - part toy, part game, part tool, it exists at that node where the practices of science and the practices of culture collide. ( Insert picture)
The Simlife text, as well as the program, goes to great lengths to resist the appellation of mere game:
Simlife isn't exactly a game - it's what we call a Software Toy. Toys, by definition , are more flexible and open-ended than games....In Simlife, the "toy" is a biology laboratory in a computer.13
While little may be seen to be at stake here in a genre distinction - what matter if we are dealing here with a toy, a game, or a weapon? - the emergence of simulations as a cultural form, it seems to me, marks out an important difference in the cultural matrix of the gene: More than a scientific object in any classical sense, the "genes" one chooses, manipulates and cultivates in Simlife have crossed over into a kind of genetic Holodeck, where the categories of the real and simulacrum themselves constantly cross over and implode into each other, as the laboratory follows our mouse into the computer. Hence Simlife is a game, toy and tool for learning not just about artificial life, but about real life. What is it that Simlife simulates? How does it entertain? Click Click to find out, on the Simlife world I will call "Watsonia" in honor of James Watson's wonderfully Simlife ethos: "In order to know what life is, we must know how genes act."
Watsonia
You have already learned two of the technologies of the gene associated with Simlife: look into the computer, and when in doubt, click. Given the constraints of the textual realm I am operating in here, I can only simulate the click, but you'll get the picture. Follow along as I narrate a sample world creation in Simlife. As I go, I will attempt to foreground the implosive rhetorics at play in Simlife.
After entering the Simlife environment through an initial command: SIM, we began the first part of the game/simulation: a genesis fantasy. No longer the province of God's finger, genesis has been democratized to include anyone with a mouse. Clicking on "experimental", we get to choose our own creatures, control the creation of our own world, set its climate, watch it run from that space Gelernter refers to as "Topsite." Simlife is a transcendental toy; it allows the look into the computer screen to be a look down, as the first sight of the Simlife screen is a surveillance shot; lest we forget that Simlife was developed with the help of Los Alamos and its new age complexity franchise, the Santa Fe Institute, we can see the military gaze built right into our game/toy/tool. Looking down and around our world, we can take it all in, without any night vision goggles.
No simple origin story here ; I have already done some creation work, and the first gaze of Watsonia features the frenzied movement of crawling sea urchins, sprouting sea lettuce, some annoying, chimerical dogs called Moofs, and my personal favorites, those persistent trilobites. While the fantasies of control this game/tool/toy makes possible are obvious - fantasies that Watsonia shares with Watson - a perhaps less obvious effect of Simlife is the another fantastic operation: being-out-of-control. With the complex interactions of climate, speciation and mutagens, even the advanced Simlife player/researcher/creature will quickly get that exhilarating, positive feeling of a lack of control; the sea lettuce has mutated to swim, the trilobites have learned to fly, and there are no male Moofs left. How did that happen? As I said, when in doubt, click.
Click on History, and you'll find a fine map of SimHistory. History here is a list, a "running record of all events in the world" 14 No background matrix, no narrative, the world of Watsonia is chronicled as a series of events. Interactions take place in the background; despite Simlife's goal that the user "understand that the real world with its millions of species with their combined billions of genes are interrelated and carefully balanced in the food chain and the web of link"15 or perhaps because of it, History is a list of extinctions, sproutings and mutations. There is no web of relations connecting these events. Its up to the user to produce the Sim Narrative.
The immanence of history here - it's already there, waiting to be read with the click of a mouse - roughly parallels the immanent view of life expounded by Watson above: Life exists in the gene, genes are the actors of life, and bodies mere supplements or extensions of the miraculous software called DNA. Indeed, in Simlife, bodies are transparent. Click again, this time on "life." It's shaped like a double helix.
Clicking on the double helix gives you something Biologist Richard Dawkins already has. In his popular account of evolutionary theory as a critique of the argument from design, The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins is anything but blind; he's got x-ray vision:
it is raining DNA outside... Up and down the canal, as far as my binoculars can reach, the water is white with floating cottony flecks, and we can be sure that they have carpeted the ground to much the same radius in other directions too. The cotton wool is made mostly of cellulose, and it dwarfs the tiny capsule that contains the DNA, the genetic information.....It is the DNA that matters, The whole performance, cotton wool, catkins, tree and all, is in aid of one thing and one thing only, the spreading of DNA. This is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer if it were raining floppy disks.16
With this kind of vision, Dawkins can see right through the fluff of the body, as the gene becomes the privileged site of power and "truth." The oscillation in Dawkins' account between a rhetoric of truth and the deployment of metaphor is beyond the scope of this essay, but suffice to say that this oscillation is mimed by the sometimes real, sometimes simulated status of the alife creatures in Simlife. So too does Simlife mime Dawkins' X-ray vision: if you want to see the genome of a Simlife creature, just click on it with the double helix, and a window zooms out to exhibit the control panel/genome that determines the characteristics of any organism. And yet this, according to the Simlife manual, is not what these organisms really look like;
As you play Simlife, the different plants and animals will visually appear in a few different ways. None of these ways truly and accurately shows the way these organisms look. These electronic organisms exist as ones and zeros-energy states in transistor switches in the memory chips of your computer. Assuming that most of the beings that play Simlife are human, and that none of the humans we know can see energy states in transistor switches, we figured we'd better find some way to visually present Simlife-forms in a way that humans can see and understand.17
Thus the implosion between "real" organisms and "Simlife" organisms is complete, leading to a reversal; No longer what we see on the computer screen, Simlife creatures now dwell inside the computer, beyond the screen. And yet these ones and zeros are both the "organisms" and their "genes"; as in Dawkins' account, for all practical purposes, organisms are nothing but (electronic) DNA. In Simlife, what is "real" about an organism are its genes, code that dwells in the computer. Simlife "bodies" are energy states. Whereas the chimerical cover and genre of Simlife announce implosions of "phenotypes", the location of the "real" appearance of Simlife creatures as inside the computer - You stuff the huge multi-institutional ratwork that encompasses you into a genie bottle on your desk - maps out the overtaking of phenotype by genotype that has characterized molecular genetics. Just as the fluff of cellulose is a mere avatar or interface for the selfish gene, so too are the pixels of Simlife blurred reflections of the real Simlife organisms, organisms that dwell not on the screen but in it, beyond it.
While we may still press our noses up against the screen, looking in vain for the true and accurate picture of the real, we nonetheless have access: clicking on the mouse gives us an avatar, a simulated body of a creature under the purview of "Charles Darwin (only in his dreams)", one of the suggested subject positions for the Simlife user. What it gives us access to is another question, one I can only speculate on, since I have not yet played Simlife long enough. It plugs us into the new truth of bodies as extensions of our genetic software, our new understanding of "what life is." As model rocketry in the heyday of NASA enabled many to participate in that "giant step for mankind", what William S. Burroughs has dubbed "getting this barnyard into space", electronic biology plugs us into, makes us virtual witnesses of, genomics.18 It connects us to the circuits of culture and technoscience that brings biotechnology to Wall Street, Washington, and finally, our SimLiving rooms.
Of course, it is the status of this circuit that I want to question. Whereas "life" is ascribed to the autonomous and isolated little bits of energy swarming around the computer, I want to highlight the importance of what we could call "rhetorical software" in the constitution of Simlife. For it is with rhetorical operations that the vitality of Simlife organisms is located on the screen, indeed located at al. While philosophers such as Peter Godfrey Smith grapple with the metaphysical question - Is alife really alive, or not? - I want to highlight the possibility conditions that allow this to be posited as a question at all.19 For what makes Simlife "lively"?
I have thus far focused on the interactions between Simlife and its users for good reason: against the grain of the claim that alife creatures "themselves" enjoy the burdens and benefits of vitality, I want to suggest that the screen that orients alife is on a plane of immanence, a massive assemblage of machines, users and rhetorics that semiotically and materially distribute the "vitality effect." The relation between the user and the Simlife organisms is more one of ongoing interaction than demiurgical creation, a theological subject position that Simlife, as well as alife in general, constantly alludes to. 20 And this ongoing interaction produces effects on the user as well as the Simlife organisms. Karl Sigmund, writing in Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution, and Behaviour remembers the need that Conway's game of life - an early precursor to contemporary alife - had for human wetware:
In the early 1970's, at a time when computer viruses were not yet an all to common plague, there was another type of epidemic causing alarm among computer owners. It [Life] used the human brain as intermediate host.21
While the status of Sigmund's description here is uncertain - is he serious? - the recognition of the material substrate necessary for Life to propagate is well put. Neither masterful creator nor objective observer, the player of Life was an element in the alife ecology. This ecology was also an ecology of bodies; the affects and pleasures that enabled the propagation of Life traversed bodies, produced corporeal effects.
And what, we might ask, produced these effects? Whence came the pleasures of Life? Some, no doubt, were of a purely cognitive kind, but the emergence of complexity from the simple patterns on a grid is, for some, akin to the sublime. Christopher Langton, coiner of the term "artificial life" , reminds us of the "depth" of the seemingly flat computer screen:
The computer was running a long Life configuration, and Langton hadn't been monitoring it closely. Yet suddenly he felt a strong presence in the room. Something was there. He looked up, and the computer monitor showed an interesting configuration he hadn't previously encountered. "I crossed a threshold then," he recalls, "it was the first hint that there was a distinction between hardware and the behavior it would support...You had the feeling there was really something very deep here in this little artificial universe and its evolution through time.22
The depth that Langton encounters here, a depth associated if not identical to the vitality of the Life configuration, is beyond the screen. It is enabled by the simultaneous immersion in the world of Life and its disavowal, "Langton had not been monitoring it closely." Elsewhere, I have written of the way in which the autonomy and vitality of the alife creature is enabled by the structural blindness of this glance away: The power and vitality associated with the alife creature is directly related to its autonomy, and its autonomy occurs through the occlusion of the machines, bodies, desires and softwares that foster it. Hence, "life" is contained "in" this artificial universe, not in the (natural?) (uni?) universe. Just as, as Judith Butler has argued, identity is associated with an invisibility of the institutions and communities that enable it, so too does vitality seem to emerge only through the invisibility of its networks. And yet, an other reading is also available here: Langton was looking at the alife body. That is, what Langton was looking at in the glance away was not nothing;; it was the "external", material network of practices that enabled the uncanny movement on the screen.
Tom Ray, another alife pioneer, indirectly supports this thesis in his discussion of ribotype theory:
Modern evolutionary theory is firmly based on the duality of the genotype and the phenotype. However, Barbieri (1985) has described a new view, in which life is based on a trinity of genotype, phenotype and ribotype. At the molecular level, the genotype is the DNA, the phenotype is the proteins, and the ribotype is the collection of molecules and structures based on RNA, i.e., the mRNA, tRNA and the ribosomes. The latter group of molecules, referred to collectively as the ribosoids, perform the critical function of translating the genotype into the phenotype.23
Of course, for Ray the conversion of alife genotypes takes place in the computer, but I would like to suggest that the vitality of alife organisms - the transformation of alife codes into lifelike behavior - is complicit with the material, interpretive work of alife researchers and players. Deleuze and Guattari make an analogous argument about the relationship between the wasp and the orchid, a relation they characterize as a "rhizome." 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.24
So too do Simlife creatures image all too human desire, the desire for transcendental subjectivity of choice and purity of descendence. But the corporeal players of Simlife are also complicit in the "reproduction" of Simlife; the distribution of Simlife creatures, the deployment and articulation of their vitality, relies on the external ""wetware" of human brains, their rhetorical softwares, their bodies and machines, just as the orchid is bound up with the wasp. Thus, Life, and by extension Simlife, is not a one person game. Karl Sigmund claims that
Life is not a two person game like chess or checkers; neither is it a one-person game like patience or solitaire. It is a no-person game. One computer suffices. Even that is not strictly required, in fact, but it helps to follow the game. The role of human participants is reduced to that of onlookers. Apart from watching the game, one has just to decide from which position to start. All the rest proceeds by itself.25
Here I want to agree with Sigmund that Life, and all alife games, are "no person" games. No person or subject reigns over Simlife creatures. They nonetheless do not proceed autonomously, by themselves. Alife works off of a distributed corporeality; the phenotype of the Simlife code, its necessary translation apparatus as well as what it produces, includes the bodies and brains of its players, as well as the material and rhetorical webs within which they live. It relies on a mobius body, one both within and without the screen, one at once inside the computer platform and outside it.
Thus as virtual witnesses to genomics, we form a rhizome with it. In this light, the transcendental discourse of "topsite" that seems to cling to the space of the computer screen can be seen to be an effect of the screen among others, and not its cause. Rather than merely enacting the transcendental desire of the player, Simlife produces a sense of complicity with a world beyond and around and of the screen, an exhilarating feeling of "depth", the sublimity of the chaotic multiplicity at play in the Simlife world. The player becomes Moof, becomes trilobite, becomes plant, in the Simlife ecology, producing radically destratifying effects on the subjectivity of the user. Indeed, in some ways Simlife is a game of and about becoming, as the Simlife organism - including its interactive phenotype, the alife body of the user and his networks - only appears as motion in space and time. The very materiality of the screen, the appearance of the Simlife organisms, seems to pulse. The creatures mutate, the user interacts, and nothing like a simple subjectivity reigns.
But the plane of immanence, where moof, human and silicon are all on the menu, crashes into transcendence, for genomics is not merely a technoscientific practice: it is a subjectivity machine. The constant choosing - Simlife is also game of and about choice - reinscribes the difference humanity makes, collapsing the network into a node on the screen. The return from the glance away ends at the screen, a "looking up" at topsite, locating and rendering discrete the Simlife organism, transforming the user from a complicit element in an ecology to a choosing, viewing subject, an "onlooker", a witness of and not a participant in the alife phenotype.
One final example helps make this virtual witnessing point. In the Simlife tutorial, the first action the user is directed to take in the Simlife World is to "draw your name in seeds." Watching the seeds sprout, grow and die in something approaching the pattern of your name plays out the drama implicit in much of genomics. The writing of the signature, your signature, gives the effect of individual, human difference and control - you, after all, dominate that genie bottle on your desk, you populate it, design it. As the seeds sprout and plants grow and die on your Simworld, "your" signature changes - bits fall out of a letter here and there, until it becomes some other, barely legible, " word", then blending in with the messy background and frenzied movement of Simlife. Hence the double gesture of transcendence and immanence: the user gets to inscribe and be inscribed by the genetic playground Simlife. So too with the culture of genomics: the race to locate the genetic basis of everything simultaneous places control in the hands of "us" (doctors, biologists) even while it highlights our submission to the inscriptions on our genes. That we might be complicit with our genes - neither masters nor victims, choosers or chosen - evaporates under the spell of subjectivity, forestalling a more-than-genetic transformation, arresting the technological ensemble that could be a playground for becoming other than we are. Our challenge, as readers, writers and players and not witnesses, is to hack this spell of transcendence with a dose of complicity.26
1This is a copy of a diagram used by Doug Brutlag in his engaging talk, "Molecular Biology is an Information Science." It of course does not fly out of nowhere: James Watson, writing in his autobiography, describes an early launching of the arrow: " The idea of the genes' being immortal smelled right, and so on the wall above my desk I taped up a paper sheet saying DNA-->RNA-->protein. The arrows did not signify chemical transformations, but instead expressed the transfer of genetic information from the sequences of nucleotides in DNA molecules to the sequences of amino acids in proteins. The Double Helix, p. 98.
2 Polymerase Chain Reaction, a technique for amplifying small quantities of DNA into large numbers of copies.
3For a discussion of the rhizome, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, "What is a Rhizome?" and below, pp.
4Bernal, J.D. "Definitions of Life" New Scientist, vol 23, 1967, p. 34.
5 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 266,
6An example of such a strata that is composed of more than nature or culture is described in Richard Preston's recent Non-Fiction Horror Best Seller, The Hot Zone. Writing of a highway in Kenya, Preston locates it as an ecology for HIV: "The road was once a dirt track that wandered through the heart of Africa, almost impossible to traverse along its complete length. Long sections of it were paved in the nineteen-seventies, and the trucks began rolling through and soon afterward the AIDS virus appeared in towns along the highway." While marking the idiom of horror within which this text is inscribed - the book ends with a safari to find a virus in Kenya - I also want to highlight its insistence on the link between the emergence of "hot" viruses and that cyborg monster, capital. In effect, The Hot Zone argues that transnational infrastructures - and not simply "the rainforest", "Africa" or "Nature" - are the petri dish and vector of such life forms. As such, such viruses or neither "natural" nor inevitable; they emerge from the mixture of asphalt, speed and money that compose the contemporary earth.
7Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 270.
8Artificial life emerges out of several domains, but the hegemonic desire is for an understanding of the universal character of life. On this account, biology has thus far been hamstrung by its dependence on only one form of life, carbon based life. Thus alife, so the story goes, gives researchers access to more than life as we know it. It allows our gaze to fall on "life-as-it could be." See Langton, Christopher (Ed.). Artificial Life, Addison-Wesley, 1987 and http://alife.santafe.edu/alife/alife-def.html.
9Stefan Helmreich, an anthropologist that studied the emergence of alife and complexity as scientific objects, has produced an extraordinary acount of the these practices. See his dissertation, Anthropology Inside and Outside the Looking Glass Worlds of Artifical Life, Stanford University, 1995.
10 Gelernter, David. Mirror Worlds, p. 52.
11Gelernter, David. Mirror Worlds, p. 1.
12Rotman, Brian. "Thinking Diagrams"
13Simlife manual, p
14Simlife manual, p. 95.
15Simlife manual, p
16Dawkins, Richard.The Blind Watchmaker, p.111.
17Simlife manual, p
18For the notion of "virtual witnessing", see Schaffer, Simon and Shapin, Steven. The Leviathan, pp
19see, for example
20See, for example David Heibler's "Implications of Creation", a working paper of the Santa fe Institute available at http://www.santafe.edu
21 Sigmund, Karl. Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution, and Behaviour, p. 10.
22Levy, Steven. Artificial Life: The Quest for Creation, p. 95
23Grant proposal, available at
24 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari,Felix. A Thousand Plateaus, p. 10.
25Sigmund, Karl. Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution, and Behaviour. Oxford[England];New York, Oxford University Press, 1993 p. 10.
26OED definition of complicity