Foucault’s history of biological life as an emergent political concern in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not divorce yellow, translucent slime mold from modern democratic theory. Nor did it ignore data hoarding. Both nonhuman organic material and increasingly autonomous statistical or informational activities were key aspects of the life- and environment-obsessed governance at the heart of Foucault’s biopolitical stories of democracy and vitality. As Hannah Landecker has pointed out, however, Foucault’s history of biopolitics “derives from an archaeology of nineteenth century sciences, not twentieth century ones,”1 and thus decades of biological research separate Foucault’s initial theorization of biopolitical life from contemporary work on life, reproduction, and thought. An effective return to the political problems posed by life, environments, information, data, and matter thus needs to start with recent trends in the natural sciences.
One issue that has increasingly concerned biologists since Foucault wrote, for example, has been the intellectual life lived by organic material and biological systems. Discussions of cellular decision making, choice, and sensitivity have appeared with greater and greater frequency in scientific papers,2 alongside models of life that replace bounded, if complex, bodies with unbounded organic environments. Living, in other words, has been gradually equated with thinking. Moreover, rather than trying to determine what bodies might constitute a thinking organic whole and what bodies might be relegated to unthinking part, biologists have instead tried to understand how life as a series of interconnected systems might, collectively, decide, feel, or contemplate. The discrete, bounded, potentially rational body has disappeared from much of biological as well as cognitive science, if not, of course, from mainstream political science. And life has begun to refer to fields, environments, and infinitely divisible parts that think as they process, interact, integrate, and disintegrate.
The disappearance of the potentially rational, discrete body from biological science has not, however, returned scientists or philosophers of science to the quasi- or pseudo-Cartesian realm of disembodied thought working on inert matter. Nor has it led inevitably to theories of extended or distributed, if material, cognition. On the contrary, cognition, whether disembodied or distributed, is of negligible importance to this research. Once again, thought happens in these scenarios as organic matter does work; it does not happen as brains formulate abstract absolutes. It manifests itself in decision making, choice, sensitivity, memory, and contemplation or intuition. Cognitive awareness and self-consciousness (or, for that matter, consciousness of others) are of little concern to the researchers dealing with these issues—despite a sometimes deliberate misinterpretation of their theories by philosophically inclined observers.3 To repeat, though: the absence of psychology and cognition in these models by no means undermines their explanatory or definitional value—scientists today are making a good case for reintroducing thought as a key component of life, even if this life now operates throughout fields, environments, systems, or accumulations.
This emphasis on material biological systems and processes as thought processes—on life as matter that contemplates—was, once again, not as apparent in the natural sciences when Foucault wrote. Although he described the explosion of data and information as one symptom of biopolitical governance, for example, he also situated the biological life that generated this data squarely within sexually reproducing bodies that were for the most part only incidentally thinking, contemplating, or feeling (if not necessarily speaking) bodies. As much as replicating data, shifting material-information systems, and simultaneously physical and political life were key players in Foucault’s initial articulation of biopolitical mass democracy, that is to say, they also occupied, in his view, separate spheres. In the mid-twentieth century, when Foucault wrote, natural scientists concerned with life and reproduction were not, for the most part, equally concerned with thought.
But the late twentieth-century turn in the natural and biological sciences toward thought as the defining characteristic of life—and, in particular, environmental or systemic life—also did not leave Foucault’s biopolitical theory an anachronistic artifact. On the contrary, reading these recent redefinitions of life as a new chapter in the history of biopolitics if anything vindicates Foucault’s argument that mass democracy is and has been a biopolitical enterprise. Taking as a starting point for political analysis this recent scientific work on the intellectual endeavors of unbounded living systems, accumulations, and environments, in other words, can help to make explicit the implicit connections in Foucault’s theorization between, on the one hand, information, processing, and environments and, on the other hand, biological life, reproduction, and embodied matter. Or, put differently, there is already a hint in Foucault’s mid-twentieth-century writing on biopolitics of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scientific work on unbounded thought and the reproduction or replication that gives rise to it. There is nothing in recent scientific research that undermines Foucauldian theories of biopolitical mass democracy; political theorists simply need to take seriously the implications of “life” as something less than completely relevant to bodies—of life embedded in information processing.
The rest of this chapter, therefore, describes a series of defining characteristics of the unbounded, nonhuman, nonanimal, and in some cases inorganic thought that has concerned scientists of life in recent years. Once again, biologists, cognitive scientists, information theorists, and philosophers or historians of science have all become increasingly fascinated by the intellectual as reproductive or replicating life of, for example, bacteria, mold, single cells, and algorithms. Central to these recent theorizations of unbounded thought, reproduction, and life, however, has been—against the Guardian’s reporting—the remarkable effectiveness, complexity, and depth of a type of thought that is in most ways completely alien to abstract, psychological, self-aware human cognition. The thought of unbounded, growing, replicating systems—organic as well as inorganic—instead derives from the sensitivity and memory of these systems, the randomness of their decision making, and the comparative rather than absolute quality of their conclusions. Unlike abstract cognition, divorced from growth, replication, or reproduction, this unbounded thought is always embedded, contingent, and productive. It is thought that is synonymous with the flourishing of material and informational environments. It has nothing to do with rationality or psychology. And it is the thought most likely to play a part in contemporary mass democracy.
Biologists have been exploring the sensitivity and memory that characterize the collective intellectual life of organic systems—whether these systems are mapped onto a single cell or spread throughout an aggregate of living material such as a slime mold—for a number of decades now. There are hundreds4 of papers on bacterial memory, cellular decision making, and amoebic sensitivity circulating throughout the scientific community, and each makes a case that this organic material, fundamentally, thinks. Many of these studies also explore the broader, theoretical implications of this shift toward thought in the natural sciences—some forging a deliberate connection between the intellectual life of organic material and the intellectual life of the human being. The purpose of crafting this connection between human and nonhuman thought, however, is by no means to tell a teleological story that leads from primitive, porous, cellular sensitivity to rational, embodied human cognition. Quite the opposite: linking, for example, the slime mold’s memory to the human’s memory has shored up efforts on the part of most of these scholars to do away with the progress narrative altogether—to address human cognition as one mode, and only one, among many, of thinking life.
In his book Wetware, for example, the biologist Dennis Bray makes a series of provocative biological and cybernetic claims about the intellectual life of single cells. Bray’s book is a good place to start a review of the more recent scientific writing on life or reproduction as thought, however, for a perhaps unexpected reason: it seems to undermine any claim that the past few decades of work in cell biology support a rearticulation of politics or biopolitics. Not only does Bray operate comfortably within what initially appears to be a progress narrative from the basic thought of cells to the complex thought of rational, embodied human subjects, he is also emphatic that his work is not political.
Wetware, indeed, is replete with disclaimers that warn against extrapolating metaphysical conclusions from biological or cybernetic research, and Bray repeatedly asks readers not use his writing as a platform for making cultural claims5—he reminds his audience over and over again that the cellular thought he is describing is not the same as awareness or self-consciousness; it is not human thought.6 His story, he urges, is a story only of the natural and physical sciences. It is not philosophical or political, and his point appears to be similar to, if infinitely more sophisticated than, the Guardian’s: humans should respect cellular thought because it is so unexpectedly close to human thought, even if, obviously, it never reaches the pinnacle of human psychology and rationality.
But this interplay between proposition and apology throughout Bray’s study is worth exploring in more detail. Bray’s insistence, for example, that cellular thought must be distinguished from human cognition, even as it hints at the origins of such cognition, does not detract from the book’s potential to broaden the category “thought.” On the contrary, one might easily conclude that the very tension between the familiarity and the distinctiveness of cellular memory and sensitivity in Bray’s account is what lends it its philosophical punch. Here is a type of thought, after all, as old as life, that, while relevant to human cognition, need not be addressed using the tired, and increasingly ineffective, frameworks of inquiry that have characterized (human) epistemology for the past few centuries—frameworks that have, once again, led to the gradual and frustrated removal of “thought” from the conventional articulation of the political and then biopolitical category “life.” Here, that is to say, is a possible entry point (or reentry point), despite itself, for thought in the politics of life.
But what might this revivified thought entail? Bray describes two key aspects of nonhuman, cellular thought—memory and sensitivity. With regard to memory, Bray writes that “by capturing a picture of their surroundings in molecular terms, biological systems acquire knowledge of the world in a way no other chemical or physical system can.”7 At the same time, however, although both are biological systems broadly defined, “higher organisms have a brain and spinal cord,” whereas “single cells have networks of interacting proteins.”8 Each of these organic systems—whether organized, complex “higher organism” or a single cell or accumulation of cells—is uniquely capable of capturing memories and sensitivities at the molecular level, but only the former, “higher organisms,” can translate these memories and sensitivities into information and abstraction that is meaningful to a brain. Cells and cellular systems are remarkably similar to higher organisms, in that they, too, rely on memory and sensitivity embedded in molecular environments to live. But they fail to shift this memory and sensitivity from the molecular or environmental plane to the cognitive or psychological plane.
This lack of rationality and psychology typical of cellular thought remains a framing device for countless similar moments of comparison and contrast throughout Bray’s book. In comparing the memory of bacteria to the memory of complex organisms, for example, Bray writes that although bacterial psychology, unlike human psychology, is difficult to identify, “from a superficial, operational sense the bacterial memory and the short-term memory of a higher animal perform similar functions.”9 At the same time, however, “the storage of memories by higher animals,” unlike “highly predictable and stereotypical” bacterial memory, is “dependent upon the training regime and the internal psychological state of the organism.”10 As a result, the memory of “higher animals” is necessarily more sophisticated than the memory of bacteria. Bacteria do remember in the same way that “higher organisms” remember, but their memories are characterized by organization, repetition, and operation rather than by the idiosyncratic psychological content that might be invested in them when they become part of a self-conscious narrative. Bacteria remember, whereas higher organisms translate memory into narrative and abstraction.
A third set of passages, in which Bray turns from memory to sensitivity, continues to play on this theme. “Living cells,” Bray states, “have an intrinsic sensitivity to their environment—a reflexivity, a capacity to detect and record salient features of their surroundings—that is essential for their survival. I believe,” he writes, “these features to be deeply woven into the molecular fabric of living cells.”11 This ability to feel and to remember their world, however, does not mean that cells are conscious. “Seed corn of consciousness” though they may be, Bray continues by emphasizing the point that cellular sensitivity and memory do not suggest a cellular “sense of self.”12 Like bacterial memory, cellular sensitivity is pure sensitivity, unadulterated by narrative. Or, put differently, according to Bray’s analysis, cells, bacteria, and other unbounded organic systems think, feel, remember, and acquire knowledge. They are sensitive to the world. But they do so as environments or accumulations rather than as bounded organisms. Hence, they seem always on the verge of evolving into something higher and something less prone to thought-as-growth, but they never quite reach the pinnacle that is discrete, embodied, psychological, self-aware rationality.
But might there be other conclusions to draw from the series of comparisons and contrasts that Bray presents to his readers? It is true, for example, that organisms that think with brains must be “higher” than systems that think via networks of interacting proteins in any formulation that privileges cognition, abstraction, psychology, or rationality over pure memory or sensitivity. Intriguingly, however, the aspect of biological thought broadly defined that Bray argues makes it more sophisticated than “chemical or physical” (i.e., inorganic) systems is its environmental or “molecular,” rather than its contained, qualities. What makes biological thinking more successful than nonbiological thinking, in other words, is, according to Bray’s own analysis, paradoxically also the thing that differentiates the thought of lower cellular environments from the thought of “higher organisms.”
After all, whereas higher organisms apparently locate thought, at least after it is translated into rationality or psychology, within a single, bounded space—the brain—cellular environments store their memories, knowledge, and sensitivities within the molecules that compose themselves and their environments—within the molecular composition of their world. Rather than giving one small part of themselves over to memory and sensitivity, cells turn themselves and, or as, their surroundings into memory and sensitivity. More to the point, it is this all-encompassing quality of their thought that, according to Bray, allows them to outstrip their chemical and physical counterparts. Biological thinking is superior to inorganic thinking, for Bray, because of its “lower” unbounded qualities rather than because of its “higher” bounded qualities.
These passages, in other words, do seem to lend themselves to an alternative set of conclusions—a set of conclusions that it is difficult to believe Bray himself does not to some extent endorse. Bray may appear to be telling a story of progress, for example: the thought that is “woven into the molecular fabric of living cells” is not, itself, human consciousness. It is perhaps the precursor to consciousness, the mode of thinking that makes the self (and the other) comprehensible, but readers must avoid leaping to the conclusion that cells can think in the way that humans or higher organisms can. Readers ought to respect cellular knowledge and memory, Bray seems to say, because this knowledge and memory are not as far removed from human self-awareness as they might appear to be—but we must not go too far. Once more, bacterial memory is unexpectedly similar to, but in no way as sophisticated as, psychologically inflected human memory; cellular sensitivity may hold a clue to the origins of human consciousness, but, unconscious itself, it could never be as effective as a sensitivity grounded in an awareness of the self. An obvious reading of these passages is that there is a clearly delineated set of hierarchical steps from lower to higher thought.
These passages, however, do not need to be read in such a way. Indeed, Bray himself is never quite clear about whether readers should celebrate the self-conscious, psychological, cognitive thought that characterizes, perhaps uniquely, the human mind, or whether they should evaluate this thought more critically. Moreover, even if his audience does want to place open organic or cellular systems at the beginning of the story and the contained human mind at the end, Bray writes in such a way that readers could easily interpret the book as a tale of degeneration rather than celebration. What had once been a total correspondence among matter, environment, and thought became, in the end, an impoverished, disconnected mind and self. What had once been, quite concretely, an infinitely variable memory and sensitivity of and through the world became a series of rational choices predicated on a simple sense of I and other. What had been memory and sensitivity became psychology. Bacterial memory, after all, is memory, and even working memory, in a way that subject formation or self-narrative never can be. Such thinking, knowledge, sensitivity, and contemplation are thus perhaps more sophisticated than consciousness in that they evaluate and incorporate all things and assemblages rather than distilling all things into a story of the self.
Consider, for example, a final moment in the book, where Bray describes the quite successfully irrational, multifaceted, environmental quality of cellular thought. “The images captured by the cell,” he writes
include everything from recent events to the distant past, rather like a picture taken on a family vacation. In the foreground are the fluxes of ions and small molecules that capture the moment . . . [I]n the middle distance, protein molecules display evidence of the recent past encountered by the cell in their states of chemical modification and conformational shape . . . [I]n the background of the composition we have the genetically specified chemical terrain shaped over millennia by evolution—sequences in DNA and structures of proteins that have remained virtually unchanged . . . a living cell contains an image of the world because it is born of the world.13
External memory may be a tempting term to use to describe what the cell is doing in this scenario—but it is also inaccurate. There is, after all, no divide here between the living thing that is thinking, feeling, or remembering and the environment that is thought or felt or in which the memory is stored—there is no external, no other. Rather, cellular knowledge is an environmental operation that—because it eludes self-consciousness or awareness—can incorporate not only recent experiences but a temporal image, “over millennia,” of the world.
Or, perhaps, our intuitive understanding of “external memory”—linked to digital storage—is flawed. As Jennifer Gabrys has pointed out, digital time is immediate and geological in the same way that Bray’s cellular time is—an amalgam of the “nanosecond” and extended “digital decay.”14 A “network” far more than a “storage shed,” she writes, understanding decaying computational memory is “less about placing ourselves on a known—even if imperceptible—timescale and much more about a set of unfolding temporal effects . . . indeed, digital decay can be so disorienting that it may be difficult to gauge . . . whether the rubbish is in the past . . . or the future.”15 So perhaps external memory is the proper term—provided we accept a completely new interpretation of digital life and thought.
Against the backdrop of such sensitivity and memory—whether bacterial or digital—then, cognition and self-consciousness seem to be narrow, impoverished, and ineffective; they reveal, if anything, a lack of experience of the environment. Self-aware cognition replaces knowledge of the world with a psychological narrative (or fantasy) of mind and body, of self and other. In turn, it arguably precludes both biological and political engagement with this world (here is a minor punch line of this chapter). Indeed, one might go as far as to posit that describing biopolitics with reference only to these discrete, self-aware bodies is a particularly dangerous move—likely to miss the point of both biological and political life.
Once more, Bray would be unhappy with readers drawing this sort of political conclusion from his research—and he certainly makes no claim that his writing on cellular thought has anything to do with political theory. Misusing—or abusing—the book in this way, however, can lead to an intriguing set of inferences about the type of thought—irrational, sensitive, environmental, and irrevocably bound up with life—most natural to modern mass democracy. Although the following chapters endorse neither the progress narrative nor the tale of degeneration that can be drawn from this brief foray into unbounded, nonhuman, nonanimal sensitivity and memory, therefore, they do draw on work such as Bray’s in order to offer a potentially useful definition of political thought that is neither psychology nor rationality.
Moreover, they suggest that the biopolitical mass democracy of which these cellular or bacterial variations on memory and sensitivity might form a part is a democracy that not only can, but must, take into account the centrality of thought to life. There is a conflation of memory and sensitivity, on the one hand, and vitality on the other in these scenarios that is simply not possible in a realm in which thought is an activity limited to the mind. By eradicating the gap that forms between thought and life when memory or sensitivity is translated into psychology or rationality, in other words, bacterial and cellular thought make impossible the supposed totalitarian nightmare of that much-regulated, unthinking “bare life.” There is no life without thought here because life is synonymous with thought.
Indeed, the thinking life of the unbounded system as it appears in this writing also seems potentially more politically productive than the rational cognition of the bounded, psychological body. Since distinctions between cell and environment, or even between bacteria and environment, are impossible to determine when evaluating cellular or bacterial sensitivity and memory, there can be no internal, separate, discrete space for the storage of memories or sensitivities. On the contrary, cells and bacteria transform entire environments into memory and sensitivity. And, as a result, rather than a linear transmission of political memory or information from one body to another, political memory and sensitivity grow and flourish across entire living environments. In this way, data, too, become alive and active in a bacterial or cellular biopolitical context, in a way that they cannot in a human-centered politics—while data operations become flourishing, vital processes that can only contribute to democratic engagement.
The strange political effectiveness of this unbounded thought is suggested in more targeted studies of cellular intellectual life as well. In a 2011 article in Cell, for example, Gabor Balazsi, Alexander van Oudenaarden, and James J. Collins emphasize not only the effectiveness of environmental, as opposed to embodied, decision making, but also the virtue of irrational, glitch-ridden decision making against its rational or psychological counterpart. Balazsi et al.’s goal in the article is to compare the decision making undertaken by unicellular organisms and the decision making undertaken by the cells of complex organisms (mammals especially) in order to determine how the former, as parts of the latter, deal with noise, chaos, or randomness. The authors note, for example, that whereas a disconnected population of single-celled organisms is unlikely to be negatively affected by the introduction of random error into their environment or their code, “the tremendous population expansion that cells [in a complex organism] undergo during embryonic development poses a serious danger of error amplification, implying that stochastic cellular decision making should be less common than in unicellular organisms.”16 Balazsi et al.’s project, therefore, is to describe the “noise control mechanisms” that dampen extreme variations on cellular decision making and that allow for embryonic development, among other complex cellular processes, to occur without the introduction of fatal errors.17
Important for the purposes of this chapter are the rhetorical strategies that Balazsi et al. use to frame these conclusions. For example, they describe the decision making undertaken by various different types of organisms and cells—viruses, unicellular animals, and bacteria—in order to contextualize their discussion of the embryonic cells of the complex organisms that are their specific interest. In addition, within this framework of analysis, one of their most important givens is that the notion that genetically identical cells working within identical environments will always act in predictable ways contains significant flaws—that “extensive theoretical and experimental work has started to seriously challenge this simplistic deterministic view.”18 Emphasizing the interplay between various different types of cells and environments (or among cells as environments),19 Balazsi et al. state that “intrinsic noise enables the phenotypic diversification of completely identical cells exposed to the same environment and further facilitates cellular decision making for cells already slightly different.”20 Cells and environments, of all kinds, in other words, are subject to glitches—and the same glitch can alter the thought of an entire cellular environment in unpredictable ways.
The abilities of cells and environments to respond successfully to these potential errors, therefore, depends a great deal on the breadth of their intellectual life—on their ability to know, remember, and feel themselves as their environments, whether these environments are part of complex organisms or not. Granting that even viruses are less predictable than many earlier researchers had assumed,21 Balazsi et al. thus support their conclusions with what may be—given Bray’s work—a strangely familiar comparison between the linear thought of the largely self-contained virus and the environmental thought of their bacterial, if not embryonic, counterparts. “Bacteria,” they write,
are masters of cellular decision making, which enables them to hedge bets in a fluctuating, often stressful environment. This may explain their presence in the most extreme and unpredictable environments. Unlike viruses, which typically decide between lysis and lysogeny, genetically identical bacteria can select their fates randomly from a spectrum of multiple options . . . [U]nlike viruses, bacteria can combine cellular decision making with other mechanisms (such as cell-cell communication) to achieve more complex population-level behaviors. Cellular decision making appears suppressed when cell-cell communication becomes prominent (as in quorum sensing), suggesting that microbial individuality is undesired when genetically identical bacteria assume multicellular behaviors. The above examples indicate that many bacterial species are capable of population-level behaviors. Moreover, these examples suggest that the simplest forms of multicellular behavior do not require physical contact or communication between cells.22
Bacteria, then, are “masters of cellular decision making” because they make their choices randomly, they fail to distinguish between a discrete cellular body and an accumulation or an environment, and they likewise fail to distinguish among discrete cells. Unlike viruses (and, for Bray, humans), which are characterized by their isolation, by their life as a series of discrete reproductive acts, and, perhaps above all, by their drive to replicate and communicate, in a linear fashion, distinct, coherent strands of information—essentially to pass messages—bacteria think and remember through environments that are in turn open-ended systems. Bacteria are matter that is alive because it thinks broadly, regardless of its communicative activities, rather than because it communicates narrowly and in a single direction.
Obviously the point here is not that human thought is somehow the same as viral thought. But the echoes of Bray’s distinction between the higher organism’s self-contained, communicative, and psychologically self-aware state and the virus’s (unfit because discrete) communicative-reproductive state is evocative. In fact, if the intuitive organic hierarchy that appears to frame Bray’s comparisons falls out of the picture, there seems to be an unambiguous—or indeed emphatic—insistence in both studies on the superiority of thinking outside the confines of a bounded, self-aware body. Bacteria are alive, and are flourishingly alive, first, because they are thinking and, second, because they are not cognitive, rational, or self-aware. Bacterial decision making is worthy of respect because it does not lead in any noticeable way, after millions of years of evolution, to psychology or consciousness. Psychology and message transmission are something of a dead end here.
The remarkably adaptive quality of this irrational intellectual life appears in other recent discussions of cellular decision making as well—standing in distinct contrast to the parody of self-interest that the Guardian describes in its search for the slime mold’s protohuman awareness. Tanya Latty and Madeleine Beekman, for example, have extended in intriguing ways research into the effectiveness of “irrational decision-making”—here in amoeboid organisms. Noting that slime mold [Physarum polycephalum], for example, “lack[s] a brain, and [that] all information processing occurs via highly decentralized processes,” Latty and Beekman, like Balazsi et al., question the usefulness of “economic and behavioural models [of thought] based on absolute valuation.”23 The conclusive, rational choice that would lead to the preservation of a single, discrete organism with some protovariation on human-style consciousness or cognition is absent, in other words, from this mode of thinking and life. Slime mold, like higher organisms, may engage in a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to seeking food,24 but given that, for slime, eating is as much thinking or decision making as moving toward food or allocating biomass to certain areas is thinking or decision making, there is no cognitive understanding of a tension between self-interested body and harsh environment to frame this behavior.
As Latty and Beekman continue, indeed, although it may very well be that “comparative decision-making processes” are more common than “absolute decision-making mechanisms” because the former produce similar results with less computational effort—that is, because they are more efficient—their study also posits an alternative explanation. They propose, additionally, that “comparative decision-making strategies may arise as an unavoidable consequence of the way in which living systems process information.”25 The comparative and experiential, as opposed to the cognitive, rational, and absolute approach to information processing, that is to say, may very well be the result of a quite normal lack of a divide between body and system. This type of thought may be the productive result of the absence of any distinction among organism, matter, environment, and information. Irrational thought may be more about intellectual life than it is about efficiency.
If the default position is that organism, environment, and information always overlap—if, to draw from Bray, an organism’s memory or thought is woven into its own molecular fabric and the molecular fabric of its environment—then comparative decision making would be the most effective and the most productive mode of thought in which to engage. Rational, self-aware cognition of the sort that characterizes higher organisms would fail to take advantage of the knowledge, sensitivities, and information embedded throughout the system. Or, as Latty and Beekman conclude, “Although we have shown that P. polycephalum behaves ‘irrationally’ this does not necessarily imply that its behaviour is maladaptive.”26 The irrationality of contemplating as a system rather than communicating or transmitting information from discrete body to discrete body is instead—as Balazsi et al. put it—quite “masterful.” Perhaps more than that, though, it is characteristic of a wholly or exclusively intellectual life, of a life lived in thought.
This irrational, comparative, and far from abstract or absolute decision making also lends itself remarkably well to alternative variations on mass democracy. It conjures up the possibility that democratic engagement need not always operate in a future populated by rational, embodied “persons”—by persons whose completion can only ever be postponed—but that, indeed, democracy can also exist in the present; democracy need not be constantly deferred. In the process, this variation on decision making also nullifies the ostensible political threats posed by the ongoing, flourishing, yet always incomplete organic or informational assemblages that repeatedly evade the status of “person” altogether. Endless, this type of thought ends the constant democratic crisis. Unbounded thought as it appears in this writing, therefore, seems to be at the very least an intriguing substitute for human-centered mass democratic engagement. In a very basic way, it creates a small space for democratic processes actually to begin.
But can this mass democratic life-as-thought also be found in nonbiological or inorganic growing systems? Each of the studies of cellular decision making that has appeared thus far has taken the organic quality of life and thought as a given. These cells and environments that think—whether they are the multinucleate cells of the slime mold, unicellular organisms, bacteria, viruses, or mammalian cells—are biological. They are the product of organic evolution, and they demonstrate, in addition to thinking, other fundamentally “living” behaviors such as eating, growing, and producing waste. They are on an organic spectrum with humans, they are related to psychological beings, and hence they qualify for what Prochiantz, for example, determined to be both life and thought.
These studies also, however, suggest, at the very least, a blurring of the lines between organic life as thought and inorganic (especially computational) life as thought. This gesture is clear in the subtitle of Bray’s book, A Computer in Every Cell, as well as in the information theory methodologies on which Balazsi et al. draw and Latty and Beekman’s designation of slime mold as an “information processing system.” Whereas Bray, Balazsi et al., and Latty and Beekman suggest a coming together of organic and inorganic life, however, scholars such as Parisi explore the implications of a systemic thought that is purely inorganic, computational, and algorithmic—even while it remains as relevant to cellular thinking as, if not more relevant than, the thought produced by discrete, rational brains.
Indeed, in her Contagious Architecture27 Parisi challenges scholars to take seriously the contemplative potential of an algorithmic processing—what she calls a “soft thought”—that is “as irreducible to the neural networks of the brain-mind as are bacterial and vegetal modes of cognition.”28 The richly contemplative quality of algorithmic processing, she continues, has in fact been obscured as a direct result of the ongoing political emphasis on “cognitivism” or “enactivism”—in short, on the classic or conventional biological emphasis on the brain as the seat of thought and feeling. On the one hand, she writes, cognitivism and enactivism assume that “algorithmic computations are equivalent to programmed procedures, sets of executable instructions, which define cognition in terms of data performance on differing forms of hardware.”29 On the other hand, traditional biological models of thought assume that the brain evolved, specifically, as an organ to think, and that thus anything divorced from a brain or brain-like structure, even if it looks like thought, is not in fact such a process.30
But, Parisi emphasizes, neither of these assumptions withstands close scrutiny. Moreover, and perhaps more to the point, neither can help commentators to appreciate the extensive, nonprocedural, and often random (or, to invoke Latty and Beekman, irrational) intellectual activities in which algorithms clearly, empirically engage. If anything, the rapid expansion of algorithmic thinking over the past decades undermines “the neural or biological body’s status as the house of soft thought”—suggesting that thought may be only incidentally “linked to the brain . . . contingent on an accident in the evolution of multicellular organisms.”31 As an accident, therefore, “the brain-thought link cannot by rights exclude the possibility of a form of thought that is not mediated by a neural network or even less by a brain.”32 It cannot preclude the potential for thought that exists within the flourishing error, accident, or glitch—within the intuitive leaps of an algorithm that has begun, by mistake, to process impossibly infinite quantities of data.33 Like bacteria that thrive because of their processing errors and their random decision making, that is to say, algorithmic or inorganic thought, too, seems to come alive because of the glitches it encounters.
At the same time, associating the soft thought of inorganic processing with the thinking life of bacteria is to misread Parisi’s book. One of Parisi’s primary goals in Contagious Architecture is to divorce thought from both “mechanical functionalism” and “embedded vitalism”—to make a case for thought that is explicitly not life.34 Both the political obsession with life and the simultaneous embrace and fear of the machine, she writes, are obstacles to appreciating the work of algorithmic contemplation.35 At the same time, however, the sympathetic references to organic life (such as plants and bacteria) and to the mechanical existence of buildings and computers that appear throughout the book suggest, at least, that one might, if carefully, nonetheless recuperate vitality and the machine when theorizing an intellectual life that remains politically relevant. Misreading Parisi and Bray together, in fact, can lead to some productive conclusions concerning the character of contemporary democratic engagement.
The life-as-thought that emerges in both Boundless Informant and the slime mold, after all, by no means privileges bodies, neural networks, or brains. And the machines that are engulfed in these organic and inorganic political and reproductive systems are similarly indefinable as tools or hardware. This flourishing, if sometimes inorganic, vitality whose defining characteristic is its thought, in fact, is arguably the same systemic if contained, material if symbolic, and irrational if adaptable vitality that might very well be associated with a processing algorithm. As Parisi herself writes when introducing the concept of “contagion”—or the “immanence of randomness in programming” that occurs as “infinite amounts of data” enter a function—the “contagious architecture of these actualities is constructing a new digital space, within which programmed architectural forms and urban infrastructures expose not only new modes of living but also new modes of thinking.”36 Her emphasis is on thought. But life is prowling there too.
Consider, for example, Parisi’s more detailed characterization of algorithmic thought. It is, again, immanent and comparative rather than absolute.37 It is always ongoing, incomplete, and without end as it deals in “infinities and multiplicities” that can never be fully processed.38 It is subject to accidents, glitches, and inefficiency.39 It is not a tool of rationality.40 And it is constantly building up symbolic or digital environments,41 transforming the storage and transmission of data, transforming processing, into an architectural exercise.42 Once more, these characteristics of algorithmic soft thought seem to have little to do with the thought of living organisms (or of machines) as they are ordinarily described. But are they really so completely immune from life?
What about, for example, the comparative rather than absolute decision making undertaken by Latty and Beekman’s slime mold? Is this organic and vital, but not cognitive, mode of information processing also divorced from algorithmic contemplation? As Latty and Beekman make clear, slime mold, too, never reaches an absolute end to its thought. Its thinking, too, never transcends its environment, it never reaches some final conclusion that places it, the thinking being, apart from its food or its surroundings, and indeed, its thinking is—consider the image on the Guardian’s website—if anything, architectural. The slime mold is evolutionarily incapable of transforming its contemplative processes into a theory of self and thought other. It thinks through, or as, its environment, it continues processing and comparing information, and—perhaps most important—it never stops this processing. But the slime mold is, to repeat, very much alive. And its life-as-thought hints that perhaps the algorithm could also be alive in its thought. Clearly organic life is not an option to the algorithm—but political life and intellectual life seem very much available to it, once we set aside, as Parisi encourages us to do, rational metaphysics as the sole model of thought or intellect.
Or, alternatively, what about Balazsi et al.’s bacterial master decision makers? Remember, bacteria were successful thinkers above all because they not only dealt with “noise,” with incomputable information and data, but because they incorporated this noise into their own processing. Moreover, and more important here, these bacteria produced and built bacterial environments that were predicated on, essentially, sorting, sharing, and reproducing this flawed code. The incomputable environments that they created were hospitable to them because, like algorithmic environments, these environments were informationally indistinguishable from their supposed inhabitants (which were subject to the same glitches they were). Like the algorithmic building project, that is to say, the bacterial building project rested, first, on the noise or randomness of the information it processed but never completely digested. Second, this building project drew on an environment that began thinking—irrationally—the moment it was thought. Once again, therefore, the bacterial thought processes that produced living thinking environments seem not all that far removed from the algorithmic thought processes that produce ostensibly not-living thinking environments. Vitality seems always to be ready to reinsert itself into thought—and something that looks a lot like life is always creeping into these accidental, and thus architectural, thinking environments.
Or, finally, what about the potential creative misreading of Parisi alongside Bray? What if readers consider, for example, the series of oppositions between algorithmic thought and, specifically, human thought within which Parisi frames her argument—unexpectedly evocative as they are of Bray’s similar set of contrasts between cellular thought and human thought. Bray is, despite his vocabulary, coy about making a case for the superiority of one type of thinking over another, or for any clear-cut teleological move from ostensibly lower modes of contemplation to ostensibly higher modes. Parisi certainly does not argue for the superiority of algorithmic thinking. Her point, however, that an emphasis on rational cognition situated in the brain has obscured any effective appreciation of alternative types of contemplation does lend itself to more overt normative conclusions than Bray’s argument does. But one of these conclusions—that perhaps thought should be divorced from life—might, once more, be reconsidered given the similarities between her own, antiorganic and antimechanical argument and Bray’s overtly biological and quasi mechanistic one.
Parisi, for example, makes the excellent point that theories of both distributed cognition and “qualitative data”—each of which have been used to celebrate the multifaceted qualities of inorganic thought—actually reinforce the flawed assumption that human consciousness is the only genuine model of thought. Theories of distributed cognition, in particular, allow “cognition”—thought situated in the brain—essentially to colonize the external world, to map the brain onto matter in a sort of radical, if unintentional, pseudo-Cartesian fantasy.43 Moreover, introducing “qualitative data” into functions via external feedback similarly fails to challenge the association between “logic [and] rationality” or “aesthetics [and] sensation” that underlie human consciousness.44 Unlike human thought, therefore, algorithmic thought assigns aesthetics to logic45 and thereby ceases to “exist in direct relation to human thinking.”46 Or, put differently, algorithmic contemplation as it is described in Parisi’s study might be best differentiated from human thought in that it aestheticizes logic or information processing, in that it is “a concrete mode of abstraction” that exists specifically to think through “patternless data,” and in that it is inconclusive or incomplete—in that it considers the “infinities in finite actualities that cannot be contained in a totalizing method of computation.”47
Whereas Bray emphasizes self-awareness—or psychology—as the key quality that differentiates human thought from nonhuman thought (or, at least, the thought of “higher organisms” from cellular thought), Parisi emphasizes processing as the key quality that differentiates nonhuman thought from human thought. And each thus seems to be framing the contrast between human and nonhuman thought in quite different ways. When considering what sort of processing might lead to Bray’s psychological self-awareness and what sort of absence of consciousness might lend itself to Parisi’s soft thought, however, a series of similarities between these two sets of contrasts begin to emerge. After all, in order to create a coherent self-narrative or to come to an understanding of self and other or subject and environment, an organism must engage in rational, or what Parisi calls totalizing, thought. Bray’s human psychology seems, that is to say, to lend itself very well to Parisi’s human processing. And meanwhile Parisi’s algorithmic processing lends itself equally well to Bray’s nonhuman absence of awareness. Eternal processing, after all, is nonhuman because it cannot be wrapped up, because it cannot end in psychology.
But, once more, this thinking and processing are by no means divorced from living. Indeed, as much as Parisi’s account of the massive disjuncture between algorithmic contemplation and human contemplation seems to undermine Bray’s suggestion that the former—as wetware—may be more related to human cognition than anyone might realize, and as much as Bray’s arguments seem to undermine Parisi’s point that vitalism and mechanism are absent from noncognitive thinking, the two taken together lead to an evocative conclusion. Specifically, Bray’s inclusive gesture—his insistence that readers consider human and nonhuman thought together—lends to Parisi’s work an unexpected political punch. In addition to describing a purely alternative way of thinking in the world, and in addition to explaining the seemingly inexplicable operation and proliferation of digital space-time, Parisi’s study of algorithmic contemplation can now also serve as a jumping-off point for theorizing how democratic governance is faring in the face of the rapid extension or growth of this thought.
After all, if there is a link among algorithmic contemplation, vitality, machines, and—because, as Bray notes, they cannot be completely ignored—humans, then the thought that Parisi describes can easily become political. It indeed might be the type of thought most relevant to contemporary politics, as well as to contemporary biopolitics. Existing on a spectrum with human consciousness, it can be, despite itself, strikingly familiar to classical human-centered political theory. Evading the pitfalls of the cognitive theory that associates thought with awareness or an embodied brain, however, it need not be abandoned as an anachronistic irrelevance in the face of a contemporary mass politics of regulated, reproducing bodies. Vitality is still very much present in this alternative politics of life—but this vitality is not necessarily organic, and it is certainly not embodied.
Bracketing human cognition, in fact, might very well be a prerequisite to introducing—or reintroducing—thought into political life. Doing so, for example, can help to eliminate the impossible or absurd choice between life or reproduction, on the one hand, and thought, memory, sensitivity, or choice, on the other, that seems to present itself when self-awareness is the defining characteristic of political thought. Drawing on these alternative—organic as well as inorganic—models of life and thought, indeed, allows for each to operate harmoniously, inextricably, as political functions. And, in turn, we are presented not with absurd choices, but with a mass democratic biopolitics that is not only less gloomy than many traditional accounts would have it, but that is also more explanatory when encountering, as readers increasingly seem to do, slime and data out to colonize the world.
Where, though, does Foucault’s fundamental biopolitical behavior—reproduction—fit into this alternative framing of mass democracy? Some commentators might insist that it simply does not. Conventional interpretations of biopolitics, once again, have tended to situate life within bodies and, typically, sexually reproductive bodies. As much as scholars have argued that sexuality has gradually disappeared from biopolitical governance, to be replaced by a more isolated political focus on reproduction,48 therefore, this disappearance—itself contested—has not similarly bracketed bodies and human variations on life. If the human subject is removed from theories of biopolitics, these commentators might argue, then biopolitics loses any resonance or specificity. As a result, it seems that even if thought does not disintegrate in the face of a politics of life, it does, more narrowly, when faced with a politics of reproductive life.
At the same time, however, disembodied environments, fields, and systems—organic as well as inorganic—have never been entirely absent from biopolitical theory, and addressing biopolitical reproduction as an environmental, rather than an embodied, phenomenon is by no means a departure from other, equally well-established interpretations of modern mass democracy. But what have these environmental variations on the reproduction at the heart of modern mass democracy entailed—and how might they be grounded within ongoing scientific work on life as thought? Can a democracy that takes recent scientific research into unbounded life and thought as its starting point survive the politicization and regulation of reproduction?
First of all, and once again, a crucial quality of the living environments or systems that concern recent biological research is that these environments or systems, themselves, think. They also process information and store memories. Moreover, they think, process information, and store memories quite frequently as a means of growing, replicating themselves, or reproducing themselves. Hidden within ongoing research into slime, bacteria, cells, and processing algorithms, therefore, is in fact a quite straightforward story of potentially political environments—environments that not only live as thought, but that also, if more narrowly, reproduce as a thought activity.
Returning, for example, to Balazsi et al.’s comparisons between bacterial thought and viral thought can lead to an even more tightly focused set of comparisons between bacterial reproduction and viral reproduction. In describing how bacterial and then viral thought responds to—or becomes part of—its environment, Balazsi et al. note first that many bacteria assign separate and distinct functions to different cellular groups. “Photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation are essential but mutually exclusive functions in many cell types,” they state at one point in their paper, and so “cyanobacteria dedicate a subpopulation of cells entirely to nitrogen fixation while the rest of the cells remain photosynthetic.”49 Other examples of this sort of distribution of labor include “the segregation of somatic cells from germ cells . . . in which the tasks of locomotion and replication are allocated to different subpopulations.”50
On the one hand, then, each cell is, again, an individual of a sort—making a decision to perform one function over another. On the other hand, however, the performance of these functions becomes thought, becomes a method of engaging with matter and, or as, information, only given their embeddedness—and then dissolution into—a bacterial environment. The fact that the reproductive germ cell houses information, a message, that might be communicated or passed on in this way does not privilege it over the somatic cell as more intellectual or more relevant to thought. Indeed, the fact that it is a germ cell rather than a somatic cell is an accident of its environment: both think as they navigate and reproduce environmentally.51
The extent to which, within a living, intellectual environment, reproduction becomes a mode of thought, alongside other modes of thought, however, becomes more clear when Balazsi et al. introduce viruses into their analysis. Starting with the point that, generally, “alliances between replicators and sensor molecules may have formed to ensure that replication occurred efficiently and separately under the appropriate circumstances,”52 Balazsi et al. turn to a type of life that has, thus far, evaded such “alliances”—namely viruses. Viruses, they write,
are among the simplest nucleic acid-based replicating entities, which presently can only multiply inside of the cells they parasitize. Nevertheless, viral decisions taking place in host cells are in every aspect similar to the bacterial, fungal, and metazoan cellular fate choices . . . indicating that cellular decision making is a misnomer. In fact, “cellular” decisions are taken by more or less autonomous replicating systems that reside inside and manipulate the behavior of carrier cells to maximize the chance of their own propagation.53
If viral thought is similar to bacterial and other cellular thought, in other words, then the quasi-embodied quality of bacterial or cellular existence—the membrane supposedly separating individual cell from individual cell—is perhaps even less of a boundary or border than it seems to be. Viral decision making involves free-floating intellectual, systemic reproduction. It is a function of replicating systems without boundaries, systems that may briefly colonize cellular bodies but that are in no way even metaphorically embodied.
Moreover, according to Balazsi et al., this free-floating thought—or this set of thought operations across disembodied environments, systems, or accumulations—is more related to other modes of living thought than it initially appears to be. Indeed, if this analogy between viral reproduction and other reproduction holds, then the body of the cell, to the extent that it does exist and can be differentiated from its environment, is perhaps its least important attribute. Reproduction-as-thought has little or nothing to do with a cell’s body and everything to do with its existence as a material-informational environment. It is as viruses and other cells think through these environments, in other words, that they continue to reproduce. And so, in a relentless sort of way, life, environment, reproduction, and thought become a unified, ongoing, systemic process.
Once more, the political implications of this collapse of life, environment, reproduction, and thought into one another are difficult to overstate. And one of the most immediate of these implications, of course, is that this collapse demands a radical shift in perspective on reproduction as a democratic activity—a reinterpretation of the type of life, reproduction, and thought that are central to democratic engagement. Reproduction remains key to political theory here—as, obviously, does life. But this reproduction ceases to relate to discrete, bounded, identifiable bodies. And the life that is reproduced or replicated—and politicized—is an environmental life, a life characterized by thought if never cognition.
But science studies scholars have in fact already begun to concern themselves with the repercussions, in a variety of fields, of this shift in perspective. In what is something of a criticism of this trend in scientific research, for example, Landecker describes at some length the ethical and political challenges posed by “growing living cells of complex organisms outside of the body, often referred to as the in vitro culture of cells. Cells in this form,” she writes, “are maintained continuously as indefinitely self-reproducing populations (called cell lines).”54 The potential problem with this method of producing organic material, Landecker continues, is that alongside the reemergence of “the idea of the cell . . . with all of its fundamental-unit-of-life gravity,” scholars are witnessing the privileging of “a very particular kind of cell—a plastic, temporally adjustable, highly autonomous cell . . . one that often comes packaged with the conditions of its own in vitro existence.”55
Landecker convincingly critiques a number of implications of this production of organic material (“biologicals”) for research. She reminds her readers, for example, that “the genetic diagnosis at the core of amniocentesis depends on the ability to culture cells taken from the body, i.e. to grow and reproduce them in vitro for a certain period of time,” and that this variation on the process, at least, divorces the concept, “reproduction” almost completely from reproductive or reproducing bodies.56 Similarly, she notes that these new trends in biological research have created a situation in which “how we handle nematode matter or yeast matter or chicken matter may be more formative for what we do with and how we think about human matter than any particularity of human matter as human.”57 Finally, and perhaps most evocative, she argues that experimentation on mass-produced biologicals that seeks, specifically, to create new medical technology
imparts a new kind of relevance of in vitro plant cells to people, or at least their health and wealth. Transfection is a key experimental tool for understanding how cells work, but increasingly the emphasis has been on its role in making cells do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. In other words, parasites also see cells as something to transfect into, [and] there is a certain adoption of the parasite’s point of view in regarding cells and the plants or animals they constitute as DNA and protein factories.58
Not only, then, does one of the earliest examples of popular in vitro cell culturing—amniocentesis—remove the embodied organism from conversations about reproduction, but, given more recent trends in this direction, the distinction between human and nonhuman evaporates as scientists think through what had been purely “human matter.” Moreover, and perhaps most troubling to Landecker, scientists risk adopting “the parasite’s” or the “virus’s” point of view on life, thought, and reproduction when they introduce this commercially fabricated organic matter into their experiments.
In short, therefore, this transformation in biological research—the industrialization of cellular manufacturing as a variation on envisioning reproduction as an environmental process—has created a situation in which neither the reproducing body nor the thinking body has any salience in analyses of life or thought. This new cell biology, in other words, produces a rhetoric not of cells as little bodies, almost like human bodies, and not even of cells as little thinking bodies, not quite like human bodies. Instead, it posits a scenario composed of thinking, reproducing, organic environments—organic environments always potentially subject to transfection (if not infection) and dissolution into thinking, if parasitized, systems.
But is this transformation in thinking about life necessarily undesirable? Landecker’s approach is critical—although certainly not condemnatory. One might push her mostly value-neutral discussion even further, however, and begin to explore the beneficial qualities of these ongoing trends in the biotech industry. As Myra J. Hird has written, for example, it may be worthwhile to consider “engaging seriously with . . . bacteria”—and it may make sense to “theorize an ethics—outside pathogen histories and characterizations—that engages seriously with the microcosms.”59 It may be useful, in other words, to keep an open mind about taking the parasite’s point of view—to consider affirmatively the disembodied, yet material, existence of living, thinking microcosms.
One potential benefit of addressing life (and thought) in such a way, for example, is, perhaps unexpectedly, that it helps in challenging the neo-Darwinian privileging of genetic information over matter or material environments.60 Scholars and scientists can approach the operation of viruses (or for that matter germ plasm) not just as a form of colonization that aids (genetic) information transmission, but as, simultaneously, a form of construction—the building up of living, thinking, and, yes, also, if less relevantly, communicating environments. As a result, the human-centric (or at least, embodied organism-centric) tradition that privileges the “communication” part of viral behavior over the “matter” or “contemplation” part of viral behavior can be questioned.
But one can get there only if, as Landecker implicitly criticizes biotech researchers for doing, one adopts the parasite’s point of view—only by looking beyond the fear of the relentless string of code out to replicate at all costs, and out to force cells and self-contained bodies to do things they would not ordinarily do (out, in short, to impose their overwhelming thought on matter). When scholars, scientists, and political theorists think about viral or genetic code as one further example of integrated, thoughtful, and environmental life—life that very much exists across decontextualized cell lines—the affirmative potential is there. Or, as Hird suggests, there may be a number of hidden benefits in adopting the parasite’s point of view—not least of which is recognizing the intellectual quality of reproductive behavior.
Or, put in yet another way, and as Parisi has also pointed out, adopting this environmental interpretation of genetic organization leads almost inevitably to the conclusion that “the evolutionary model of sexual reproduction . . . needs to be re-worked through the far-from-equilibrium dynamics of molecular selection and the symbiotic networks of cellular bodies.”61 Reproductive life, in other words, becomes in this alternative context an issue not of preserving “individual variations through sexual reproduction (genetic inheritance),” but of a type of thoughtful action, distributed throughout an organic or inorganic environment—the “cloning of bacterial variations enfolded in every cellular and multi-cellular body.”62 Adopting the parasite’s point of view, ignoring whole-part distinctions, and embracing cell lines and in vitro biologicals—as biotech researchers frequently have—thus opens the door for a biopolitics of reproduction as thought, a political life that is contemplative even as it is material and vital. It allows for a politics of life as well as of reproductive life to remain a politics of thought, sensitivity, memory, choice, and intellect.
Just as ignoring human cognition and awareness—bracketing the psychological fantasy of self and other—can recuperate political thought in the form of life, removing or dissolving the self-contained body can recuperate political thought in the form of reproduction. And thus biopolitics, broadly defined, can be reinterpreted as a relentless politics of thought. If the past thirty years of scientific research is any indication, in fact, theories of biopolitical democracy can ignore neither unbounded thought nor unbounded life. Each resonates clearly and distinctly across countless permutations of contemporary democratic engagement. Or, put differently, the embedded, unconscious, unaware sensitivity and memory of cells, the irrational, accidental, glitch-ridden decision making of bacteria, the architectural, environmental, endless processing of algorithms, and the explicitly unbounded and disembodied intellectual activity of viruses and biologicals all seem quite at home in this updated version of Foucauldian biopolitics. At the very least, taking these processes and environments seriously as potential political participants seems to offer intriguing alternative solutions to many of the problems that continue to plague, or infect, the politics of life.
Or, if they do not offer solutions per se, they do offer productive alternative framing devices. They make it possible, for example, to ask whether the designation of some reproductive or informational material as “human” and some reproductive or informational material as “trash” is valid or useful. Similarly, they invite scholars to consider whether the historical regulation of bodies that reproduce, sexually or asexually, with all of the implications for gender that this regulation has entailed, is even relevant in a universe in which life and reproduction are purely environmental. And finally, they demand that political theorists rethink, from a gender-conscious perspective, many of the classic questions that concerned an earlier generation of human-centered writing, and that seemed, then, to have little to do with reproduction. Dignity, integrity, and privacy, after all, are quite a different affair when life and thought are cellular, bacterial, algorithmic, environmental, and material—but never embodied.
These questions, though, once again, can be addressed only given this reconfigured theory of biopolitics—given this theory that takes as a starting point the idea that political life can be synonymous with political thought, and that this political life operates equally well across organic and inorganic environments as it does within self-contained, embodied organisms. It may well be the case that Foucault’s theorization of biopolitics drew on prevailing nineteenth-century scientific theory. But this prevailing interpretation is not the only interpretation available to twenty-first-century researchers. As Foucault’s own references to data, information, and environments make clear, an equally healthy—if perhaps less influential—biology of contemplation and diffusion has always competed with the more mainstream literature.
Moreover, and as Prochiantz has noted, this biology—or even physics or mathematics—of thought and diffusion gave rise, if obliquely, to many of the ideas that began to dominate scientific research in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It thus perhaps makes sense for scholars to look for the origins of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century biopolitical mass democracy not only in recent scientific work, but in this earlier writing as well. Indeed, turning to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural historical literature on life and reproduction may very well provide clues that can help both to identify productive variations on mass democracy and to situate these variations on democratic activity within an established, three-century-old tradition. These historical examples of the science and politics of life and thought are the subject of the following three chapters.