Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Thu 05 Mar 2009 08:51 AM PST
Soul-Meat-Pattern
There have only
ever been three approaches to thinking about life: SOUL, MEAT, and
PATTERN. Within this trinity is everything deemed to be animate,
living, and vital. 'Soul' is not just the Scholastic, theological,
personal soul, but the Aristotelian principle of life (psyche),
the
principle of its organization. The vegetative soul of plants, the
animate and sensate soul of animals, and the rational soul of human
beings. The
hierarchy of souls is not unlike the Great Chain of Being, a biological
theology of divide-and-hierarchize. By contrast, 'meat' is brute
matter,
unthinking mechanism, the clockwork organism, the bête machine
described by Descartes -- animal or machine, it makes no difference.
Mechanism
is, in a sense, a thinking about life as meat, and meat as lifeless
(the life that is lifeless is meat or machine). Finally, distinct from
'soul' and
'meat' is a third approach, that of 'pattern.' It would seem that the
emphasis on pattern is a distinctly postmodern phenomenon, the terrain
of
cybernetics, information theory, self-organization. But this is only
part of the story. Again, Aristotle the biologist equates form (eidos)
and
'soul' as the distinguishing mark between the plant, the animal, and
the human; it is in their mode of organization, how they self-actualize
in time
('if it moves, it's alive'). Yet, Aristotle is linked to contemporary
self-organization research in that neither can explain how organization
occurs,
other than to reiterate that the whole is more than the sum of its
parts.
Thus, 'soul,'
'meat,' and 'pattern' form a trinity. The trinity is also a triptych:
soul in the center, meat on the right-hand side, and on the
left, pattern. An image of thought that continuously switches, swaps,
displaces, and replaces the place-holder that defines life: from psyche
to mechanism and animal electricity to the 'gemmules' and 'pangens' to
DNA and the 'code of life.' However, these three approaches do not form
a
periodization, with Aristotle's psyche followed by Descartes'
clockwork body followed by the genetic code. Instead, as a
trinity-triptych, they
form a kind of portrait, a face, a faciality, a field of black holes
and white walls, within which and upon which is often written: 'life is
that
whose essence can be deduced and yet whose essence escapes all
deduction.' Soul-meat-pattern. Each of these posits a central,
universal, external
principle of organization that culminates in the living, the organism,
a life-force. We can simply refer to this as the principle of life,
the
central concept that structures a whole field of investigation. Each
approach differs in its place-holders, but there continues to be a
transcendental
locus that minimally guarantees a description of life, something that
enables one to point and say 'over there...' (or perhaps, 'it's
alive...alive!'
or again, 'shoot anything with more than two legs!'). In positing such
principles of organization, the soul-meat-pattern triptych also
articulates
boundaries: living-nonliving, organic-inorganic, animate-inanimate, but
also animal-machine, human-animal, human-savage, species, races,
populations,
genomes... We can refer to this practice as boundaries of articulation. Together, the principle of life and the boundaries of articulation are
the two methods through which the West has ceaselessly reinvented its thinking about life.
Extrinsic life
There is an
inward-turning and an outward-turning aspect of this thinking. The
inward-turning divides, orders, and interrelates species and types;
the outward-turning manages boundaries and positions the living against
the nonliving, making possible an instrumentality, a standing-reserve.
The
inward-turning aspect is metabolic, in that it processes, filters, and
differentiates itself internally; it is the breakdown and production of
biomolecules, the organization of the organs, the genesis of species
and races. The outward-turning aspect is immunologic, for it manages
boundaries,
exchanges, passages; it is the self-nonself distinction, the organism
exchanging with its environment, sensing its milieu,
the individual body
living in proximity to other bodies. Nevertheless, there is always
something that complicates both aspects. The inward-turning aspect is
just fine
until the outward-turning aspect loses its grip on things. An example
is epidemics. An epidemic cannot be limited to the individual organism,
for its
very nature is to pass between organisms, and increasingly, to pass
across species borders (and national borders). What is the unit of
analysis for an
epidemic? Likewise, the outward-turning aspect is able to manage
boundaries without problem until the inward-turning aspect is
discovered to be an
illusion. For instance, if the outward-turning aspect is that which
posits the individual organism as distinct from its environment,
therefore
enabling an instrumental relationship, a standing reserve, what then is
the inward-turning aspect? We would assume it is the whole spectrum of
understanding about that organism -- its biological, physiological,
cognitive processes. But isn't each of these really a nested,
outward-turning
aspect in itself? What are the systems, networks, and pathways of the
organism if not nested layers of the outward-turning aspect? The
inward-turning
and outward-turning aspects thus complicate each other ceaselessly, and
it is therefore not inaccurate to describe their relationship, as
Deleuze
does, as one of folding (in-folding, out-folding, an embryology having
nothing to do with 'development').
Soul-meat-pattern. Again, this is not a telos,
as if to imply that genetic and information technologies are the most
advanced mode of
inward- and outward-turning. Yet, in a time of networks, swarms, and
multitudes, it would seem that the third approach -- that of 'pattern'
-- is
today dominant in the life sciences (genetics, genomics), health care
(biotech industry), technology (a-life, AI, networks), war (bioterror,
emerging
epidemics) and even alternative scientific viewpoints (biocomplexity,
emergence) [1].
A new, vital pattern
pervades systems of all kinds -- global economies, social systems,
immigration patterns, information exchanges, mobile and wireless
communications,
and so forth. Despite this, have we rid ourselves of the
divide-and-hierarchize mentality of thinking about life? Is 'pattern'
simply the new 'soul'?
Traditionally, these questions about the principle of life come under
the domain of the philosophy of biology. But what would it mean to
invert the
philosophy of biology? What would it mean to invert this thinking
(soul-meat-pattern) and this dualistic method (principles of life,
boundaries of
articulation), and consider instead a biophilosophy? Perhaps
it is precisely 'life itself' that is the problem, not the aim or the
goal.
Instead of considering the intrinsic properties of life, what about
considering life as extrinsic, as always going outside of itself?
Instead of
centering life (an essence, an organizing principle), what about
considering life at the peripheries? Extrinsic life, a life always going
outside of itself, peripheral life...
Biophilosophy vs. Philosophy of Biology
What, then, is
biophilosophy? To begin with, biophilosophy is not the same as the
philosophy of biology. What is usually referred to as the
philosophy of biology has both a syntagmatic and a paradigmatic side to
it, a horizontal and vertical dimension to it. The horizontal dimension
is the
elucidation of universal characteristics of the organism which are
perceived to be part of its essence or principle of organization
(growth and decay,
reproduction and development, evolutionary adaptation). The vertical
dimension is the development of this thinking historically in Western
thought,
from Aristotle, to natural history, to Darwinian evolution, to the new
synthesis in genetics and biochemistry. In general, the philosophy of
biology
highlights and extends the philosophical dimensions of biological
knowledge. Issues pertaining to evolution, biological determinism,
dualism,
mechanism, and teleology may be considered in the context of the life
sciences such as comparative anatomy, physiology, genetics,
biochemistry,
embryology, germ theory, developmental systems theory. The philosophy
of biology informs the three approaches to thinking about life
mentioned above:
soul-meat-pattern. The philosophy of biology also undertakes the
twofold method of identifying a principle of life and boundaries of
articulation. It
can be understood as an attempt to pose the question 'is the living
different from the non-living?' -- an ontological question -- in the
context of
another question, 'is the study of the living (biology) different from
other fields of study?' -- an epistemological question.
Is
biophilosophy simply the opposite of the philosophy of biology? Not
quite. Biophilosophy is certainly a critique of the triptych of
philosophy
of biology. But it is also a way of moving through the
soul-meat-pattern approach, while taking with it the radicality of the
ontological questions
that are posed, and which often get reduced to epistemological concerns
over classification. Whereas the philosophy of biology is concerned
with
articulating a concept of 'life' that would describe the essence of
life, biophilosophy is concerned with articulating those things that
ceaselessly
transform life. For biophilosophy, life = multiplicity.
Whereas the philosophy of biology proceeds by the derivation of
universal
characteristics for all life, biophilosophy proceeds by drawing out the
network of relations that always take the living outside itself. An
extrinsic
diagram as opposed to intrinsic characteristics. Whereas the philosophy
of biology (especially in the 20th century) is increasingly concerned
with
reducing life to number (from mechanism to genetics), biophilosophy
sees a different kind of number, one that runs through life (a
combinatoric,
proliferating number, the number of graphs, groups, and sets). Whereas
the philosophy of biology renews mechanism in order to purge itself of
all
vitalism ('vitalism' is one of the curse words of biology...),
biophilosophy renews vitalism in order to purge it of all theology (and
in this sense
number is vitalistic).
'A life' not A-life
The difficulty
with the philosophy of biology -- as with nearly all philosophical
thinking of 'the animal' -- is to resist the anthropomorphism of
our thinking about life. The approach of the philosophy of biology, the
approach of soul-meat-pattern, centers and raises up the concept of the
human
so that it is not only isomorphic with life, but so that it may rise
above life ('life itself' as the pinnacle and 'mere life' as the base
or
foundation). This has a number of effects on our thinking about life,
for it simultaneously places the human at the top of the Great Chain
while also
reserving a qualitatively distinct, non-animal place for the human.
This is the tired drama of the human, at once partaking of the animal,
natural,
biological world, and yet incessantly striving above and beyond it,
producing abstract knowledge-systems, constructing world and life,
aspiring for
the spiritual (recall Heidegger's thesis concerning animality: the
stone is worldless, the animal is poor-in-world, and the human is
world-building).
It is a drama that is by turns tragic and absurdist. Contemporary
bio-art practices can be understood as a commentary on this drama,
producing dadaist
mammals, extra ears, pigs with wings, activist crops, and 'fuzzy
biological sabotage' [2].
Biophilosophy
implies a critique of all anthropomorphic conceptions of life. But is
it possible to think this nonanthropomorphic life? Are we
determined to yet again supplant a new term ('multiplicity') for an old
one ('pattern')? The problem is not simply a nominalist one, not simply
a game
of logic; the problem is the very relation between 'life' and 'thought'
(both Canguilhem and Foucault note that the most accurate concept
of
life would be life itself). Biophilosophy is an approach to nonhuman
life, nonorganic life, anonymous life, indefinite life -- what Deleuze
calls 'a
life.' But the trick is to undo conventional biological thinking from
within. Biophilosophy focuses on those modes of biological life that
simultaneously escape their being exclusively biological life:
microbes, epidemics, endosymbiosis, parasitism, swarms, packs, flocks,
a-life, genetic
algorithms, biopathways, smart dust, smartmobs, netwars -- there is a
whole bestiary that asks us to think the life-multiplicity relation.
Life is X
The central
question of the philosophy of biology has to do with an essence of
life, a 'principle of life.' What is life? Life is X -- whatever X
happens to be, eidos, mechanism, life-force, selection, code. The concept of 'life itself' promoted by geneticists during the post-WWII era
(the genetic 'coding problem') was a renewal of a concept articulated by Aristotle in De anima
as well as his 'biological' treatises. The
implication of the very concept of 'life itself' is that 'life' is One.
Whatever it is, life is one thing, essentially one thing, for otherwise
we
could not say 'Life is X.' Even when life reveals its contradictory
nature, that contradiction is the ineffable key to life. An example is
animal
motility. Aristotle posed the question 'what makes the animal go?';
that is, from where does its energy come? The problem was picked up by
the
application of thermodynamics to animal physiology, with talk of animal
'electricity' and 'irritability' and 'vital forces.' Soon there was an
ineffable 'life force' coursing through the animal, enabling it to
counter the laws of thermodynamics.
Today a
similar process is happening with studies in self-organization and
emergence. The question has changed, but its form of the problem is the
same: 'how do simple local actions produce complex global patterns?'
The effects of self-organization can be analyzed forever (e.g. 'ant
colony
optimization') and they can be applied to computer science (e.g. CG in
film, telecommunications routing). But a central mysticism is produced
at its
core, for if there is no external, controlling factor (environment,
genes, blueprints) then how can there be control at all? Again, 'life
itself' the
ineffable, the absent center. In this sense life follows the laws of
thought: it is self-identical (whatever is living continues to be so
until it
ceases to be living), non-contradictory (something cannot both be
living and non-living), and either is or is not (something either is or
is not
living, there is no grey zone to life). It is in this sense that 'life'
and 'thought' find their common meeting point. Biophilosophy implies a
critique of the dialectics of 'life itself.' It abandons the concept of
'life itself' that is forever caught between the poles of nature and
culture,
biology and technology, human and machine. Instead it develops concepts
that always cut across and that form networks: the molecular,
multiplicity,
becoming-animal, life-resistance...But the point is not to simply
repeat deleuzianisms, but rather to invent or diverge: the autonomy of
affect,
germinal life, wetwares, prevital transductions, organismic soft
control, abstract sex, molecular invasions, geophilosophy, and what
Deleuze calls
'the mathematico-biological systems of differenc/tiation' [3].
Being, Time, Number
The philosophy
of biology is an epistemological endeavor, while biophilosophy is an
ontological one. The philosophy of biology asks 'which
category?', while biophilosophy asks 'affected or affecting?'
Biophilosophy ceaselessly spins out ontologies, none of them final,
none of them
lasting. An example: perhaps what Heidegger pointed to as the defining
philosophical concern of modernity -- Being or dasein -- has permutated
into one of the guiding concerns of the new millennium -- the problematic of 'life itself' or the zoe/bios
distinction. We are no longer
worried about the grand metaphysical concerns of Being, Time, and the
One. Biophilosophy is a permutation and transmutation of these
concerns: not
Being but the problematic of 'life itself', a concern that asks us to
rethink the concept of the vital and vitalism. Similarly, the concern
with Time
has become an interest in variation, transformation, change --
difference and repetition (the repetition of the different and the
difference of each
repetition). The contemporary interest in the event, becoming, and the
virtual-actual pair are further variations of this. Finally, the
imperative of
the One -- that Being is One, that Time is One, that the subject is
singular, that identity is the identification of the One, even the
strange
sameness of the Other in ethical thought -- all of this asks us to pose
the question: what would we have to do to the concept of 'number' to
think
beyond the One-many dichotomy? This is the question posed by Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, but it is already there in Plato's
Parmenides. Hair, mud and dirt. Is there a concept of
multiplicity that moves beyond the One-many? Could such a concept
resist a simple
denunciation of 'number' (quantity vs. quality, extensity vs.
intensity, explication vs. implication). If there is a concept of
number that runs
throughout multiplicity (a proliferative, pervasive number), and if
multiplicity is related to life, is there a living number -- a vitalist
matheme
-- that would move out of the philosophy of biology's trinity of
soul-meat-pattern? Instead of what Badiou calls the split between the
quantitative and qualitative, the closed and the open, 'number and
animal,' is there an animal number?
Being, Time, and the One thus get
recombined as 'life itself,' becoming, and number, which in turn ask us
to consider or reconsider vitalism, the virtual, and multiplicity.
Other-than-life
The philosophy
of biology poses the question, 'what is life?' In doing so, however, it
rarely asks the inverse question, 'what is not-life?'
Certainly death is not-life. But so is the rock, the chair, the clouds.
What about the computer, lunch, or a nation-state, are they not-life as
well?
What about a doll? Memories? There is a whole negative classification
of not-life implied in the positive question 'what is life?' Better
yet, rather
than the question of what is not-life, we can pose the question of the
life that becomes not-life, an other-than-life, a becoming-nonliving.
Four, preliminary examples:
Ancient Life (or, the Biology of Cthulhu)
'Biophilosophy
for the 21st century' is an ambiguous statement. Biophilosophy does not
begin with information networks, biotechnologies,
nanotechnologies, or intelligent software. In a sense, Presocratic
thinking is biophilosophical thinking. Heraclitus refers to a
nonorganic life in
this three examples of fire (formlessness in identity), flows (stepping
into the river), and the body (stability through growth and decay). A
common
logos to all change. His opposite -- but in many ways his
compliment -- is Parmenides, whose concept of the All-One attempts to
comprehend
multiplicity as another form of univocity. And then there are the Greek
atomists, particles infinitely dense and mobile...
Immediately a
dissenting point is raised: 'are we not being reductive in our concept
of life, as if life were only biological life, and not social,
cultural, economic, religious and political life as well?' Indeed,
isn't the problem the way in which biological and biomedical life has
come to be
the foundation of our emerging 'biopolitical' regimes? This 'bare life'
serves as the alpha and the omega of social and political life, at once
safeguarding the security of 'the population' while also producing a
state of exception, a state of emergency, in which 'bare life' is both
under
attack and the object of preemptive strikes. Undoubtedly. Except that
this cordons off our ability to think about life within the chess-match
between
disciplines. To the scientist who says 'life is genetic code' there is
the sociologist who says 'life is the discriminatory implementation of
genetics.' To the physicist who says 'life is the self-organization of
matter and energy' the political scientist says 'life is the struggle
between
human groups to instrumentalize natural resources.' To the humanities
professor who says 'life is the set of metaphors we forget are
metaphors,' there
is the engineer who designs 'programmable matter' and 'smart dust.'
Once in a while, there are synergistic couplings, noisesome crosstalk
that
produces monsters: in the 1980s there was talk of chaos, in the 1990s
talk of complexity, and crossing the millennium talk of networks. Or so
the
story goes. Perhaps we would like to do away with disciplines; and yet,
for all the talk of 'third cultures' we still find the two cultures in
the
most banal, everyday instances.
This not a
manifesto. All the same, there are a number of misconceptions to
address concerning biophilosophy. Biophilosophy is not a naïve embrace
of 'life,' a belief in the altruistic holism of all life on the planet.
It is, however, a rigorous questioning of the twofold method of the
philosophy
of biology (principle of life, boundaries of articulation), and the
divisions that are produced from this. Biophilosophy always asks, 'what
relations
are precluded in such-and-such a division, in such-and-such a
classification?' Biophilosophy is not and should not be simply another
name for
self-organization, emergence, or complexity. While there is a fertile
exchange between philosophy and biology on this point, it is clear that
the
sciences of complexity are unable to think both ontologically and
politically as well. More often than not, they create a new portrait of
nature (a
nonlinear, metastable, complex nature), or worse, they subsume all
non-natural elements under this new nature (thus free markets and/or
'democracy'
are self-organizing and therefore inevitable). Not everything comes
under the domain of biophilosophy, but at the same time one of
biophilosophy's
major concerns is the supposed foundationalism of biology and the
biological-biomedical definitions of life. Biophilosophy is not simply
a new
vitalism, arguing for the ineffability and irreducibility of life's
description. Yet this is perhaps the most frustrating and ambivalent
aspect of
biophilosophy. Biophilosophy is an attempt to draw out a political
ontology, and yet it is also politically agonistic, even apathetic.
There is no
ressentiment in biophilosophy; only a commitment to a 'vital
politics' accompanied by this 'molecular-wide' perspective.
Biophilosophy picks up
and reinvigorates the ontological questions left behind by the
philosophy of biology. Why 'life'?
Notes
[1] See my article 'Networks, Swarms, Multitudes' in CTHEORY (2004): part one
(https://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=422) and part two (https://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=423).
[2]
In particular, see the work of SymbioticA
(https://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au), a group of artists
and scientists engaged in exploring cell and tissue culturing
techniques as artistic practice. In a different vein, Critical Art
Ensemble
(https://www.critical-art.net) has, for some years, explored the
relationships between activism, art, and biotechnology.
[3] Aside from A Thousand Plateaus, see Deleuze's comments on life as 'resistance' in
Foucault, trans. Seán Hand, London: Continuum, 1999. For a sampling of other divergings from life, see Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal
Life, New York: Routledge, 1999; Alain Badiou, "Of Life as a Name of Being, or Deleuze's Vitalist Ontology," Pli: The Warwick Journal of
Philosophy 10, 2000, 174-91; Mark Bonta and John Protevi, Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2004; Critical Art Ensemble, The Molecular Invasion, Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2002; Manuel Delanda, "Immanence and Transcendence in the
Genesis of Form," South Atlantic Quarterly 96.3, Summer 1997: 499-514; Richard Doyle, Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living,
Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004; Miriam Fraser, Sarah Kember, and
Celia Lury, "Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism,"
Theory, Culture & Society 22.1, 2005, 1-14; Mark Hansen, "Becoming as Creative Involution?: Contextualizing Deleuze and Guattari's
Biophilosophy," Postmodern Culture 11.1, 2000; Adrian Mackenzie, "Bringing Sequences to Life: How Bioinformatics Corporealizes Sequence Data,"
New Genetics and Society 22.3 (2003): 315-32; Lucianna Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire,
London:
Continuum, 2004; Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova, "Heat-Death:
Emergence and Control in Genetic Engineering and Artificial Life,"
CTHEORY, 2000: https://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=127; Eugene Thacker, Biomedia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2004.
[4] For a quick overview, see Eric Bonabeau and Guy Théraulaz, "Swarm Smarts," Scientific
American (March 2000): 72-79. For a more thorough, and more technical introduction, see Bonabeau and Théraulaz, Swarm Intelligence: From
Natural to Artificial Systems, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
[5] This is the phrase often used by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt in their book on military
swarming, Swarming and the Future of Conflict, Santa Monica: RAND, 2000.
--------------------
Eugene
Thacker is Assistant Professor in the School of Literature,
Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology.
He is the author of Biomedia and The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.
Biophilosophy for the 21st Century
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