The relationship between translucent, yellow slime out to control the world and infinite permutations of endless data likewise bent on world domination is actually not all that striking a thought (or image), if one stops to consider it. Science fiction writing since at least the late twentieth century has given to readers a number of such scenarios—tales of things, environments, accumulations, growths, fields, or systems that seem not to go with one another but that nonetheless end up, at the very least, involved.1 Indeed, even the Guardian’s relentlessly psychological, relationship-obsessed reporting on the NSA’s data-hoarding practices transcends the simply story of rational, desiring human subjects who both appropriately2 and inappropriately3 chase, flee, and target one another. There is something both reproductive and relational about the way in which the slime and the data envelop the world.
It would be a mistake, though, to try to associate the reproductive relations of slime mold, cloned cells, embryonic growth, waste disposal, and data mining with the poetic relations of bodies and subjects, with their identities and sexualities, always in hot pursuit—just as it would be a mistake to try to find commonalities between the thought or life of these things and their embodied, animal counterparts. The story that unfolded over the previous chapters has thus been a story distinctly lacking climactic moments of sudden, intense encounter. Indeed, it has been a shameless history of everyday politics as usual.4 It has also been a biopolitical, mass democratic story. The previous pages have been one set, of many, of uninspiring narratives of reproductive, thoughtful, gendered matter and data that—as they reproduce, as they think, and as they process gender operations—introduce, incrementally, systems, fields, accumulations, assemblages, and environments into democratic structures. The fact that this story lurks beneath, and occasionally seeps out of, the more vocal tales of human citizens being watched or targeted, is at the very least, peculiar.
Mass democracy, after all, regardless of whether it is reviled and feared or accepted or even celebrated, is rarely defined as a particularly psychological mode of political engagement. Once again, the unfettered, usually male, citizen of conventional liberal democratic narratives, this subject who defies oppressive, coercive governments and thereby achieves a sort of hyperbolic mastery of intersubjective relationships, does not have much footing in such a context. But, as the previous chapters have made clear, even absent bodies, absent sexualities, absent identities, and absent subjectivity, the matter and data of the biopolitical mass democracy formulated here are by no means absent desire.
Quite the contrary, the desire of these environments of stuff and information, these systems, accumulations, hoards, and fields, is a desire that motivates any number of material and informational interactions. These masses of data, bacteria, cells, trash, or algorithms are constantly eating, engulfing, and splitting from—if not dominating and targeting—one another. And it is thus that they are political. So much so, indeed, that they produce—in their manifestation as, for example, flourishing human clone or still vital trashed reproductive material—the sort of fear in human subjects that is ordinarily reserved for more conventionally evil, humanesque (antidemocratic) monsters. These processes, as the Guardian reporting on the slime mold makes clear, must at least secretly want to rule or colonize.
But as the previous chapters have also demonstrated, nonhuman thought, life, and reproduction as specifically political activities need not be feared in this way. Nonhuman political operations need not be reviled. Far from it, reading the history—at least three centuries in the making—of these activities as democratic activities, and appreciating the fact that mass democracy is, it seems, already nonhuman, and productively so, can provoke an unexpected sort of optimism. Accepting the political character of simultaneous nonhuman reproduction and nonhuman thought, for example, can aid in addressing any number of issues that conventional human-centered liberal democracy seems unable to handle. Embryonic growth, human cloning, trash disposal, and data mining need not be defined as looming menaces to overcome but, rather, as modes of democratic engagement in and of themselves. It is already intuitively apparent that these issues are political, and that they affect democratic theory. Shifting the historical framework of inquiry, and understanding the politics of nonhuman life, reproduction, and thought, can lead to an appreciation of their democratic value as well.
More specifically, dwelling on how nonhuman politics plays out in such varied arenas as cellular decision making, fetal development, embryonic research, cloning, waste disposal, and data mining can help commentators to recognize that reproductive mass democracy need not jettison thought as a political activity. On the contrary, if thought is redefined as a nonhuman—irrational rather than teleological, comparative rather than absolute, environmental rather than psychological, and accidental rather than planned—material process, then life and thought become linked, or inseparable. Doing away with the brain as organ of thought (alone), that is to say, opens up a remarkably productive space for simultaneously thought-based and life-based democratic engagement.
In turn, reproduction becomes infinitely more varied and, if unexpectedly, also politically anchored in this context than it is when biological life and symbolic thought are assumed to be at odds with one another. Reproduction becomes not a single act, initiating the beginning of growth, and related only to the potential, formed, embodied individual that can be either politically alive or politically thoughtful. It becomes not a single moment of message transmission from one body to another. Rather, reproduction becomes an ongoing thought process, a series of life- and thought-sustaining operations that build up environments and that value matter as information. Reproduction becomes a simultaneously environmental, material, informational, and political process, and hence the democracy that takes reproduction as its centerpiece becomes a democracy that can, to repeat, cope with an array of supposed challenges to political existence.
Embryonic material, clones, trash, and mass surveillance, after all, each assault conventional liberal democratic structures with what seem to be unanswerable demands. The embryo must be a person in such structures—embodied, possessing dignity, and bearing political life—but it can be a person in this sense only in an imaginary future. Its present existence makes a mockery of all three. The clone, contrarily, cannot be a person in such structures because, with no lineage, it has no dignity—but its potential to become a person is no different from any other embryo’s potential. It too, therefore, makes a mockery of conventional democratic claims to protect embodiment, integrity, and life. Reproductive trash must be either a person or not a person—one or the other, it cannot operate in both worlds. If it is a person, then its status as waste is criminal; if it is not a person, then its status as waste is legitimate. But all trash is always somewhere on a spectrum between person and not person. Hence it too obliterates any clean line between embodied and violated, alive and dead. And finally, most prominently, data hoarding must be regulated or curtailed in order to protect privacy rights. But these privacy rights cannot be attached to any specific individual subject-citizen or body. Classic democratic conventions, in short, simply cannot cope with technological or historical situations such as these—or, if they can, they do so by demanding a somewhat arduous suspension of disbelief.
But moving away from these classic liberal conventions—this fixation on what constitutes the human—and rethinking the embryo, the clone, and trash with reference instead to an intellectual mass democracy transforms these figures not only into appendages to contemporary politics, subject to toleration, but into central and indispensable political actors. The contemplative embryo, in the present, invites commentators to bracket conventional approaches to it. It makes clear that the challenge it poses to liberal democracy is not what it means to be politically human but whether politically relevant thought is the unique preserve of the human. By hinting that, perhaps, such thought is not so, the embryo likewise helps to turn reproductive activities into activities that contribute to democracy rather than undermining it.
The contemplative clone similarly suggests that the fear motivating the past three decades of anticloning legislation has by no means been a fear of identical, and thus not quite human, nonpersons, but a fear of an alternative, yet nonetheless politically valid, mode of reproduction. It is a fear of reproduction as growth and thought, reproduction as a multifaceted variation on information processing—rather than reproduction in opposition to growth and thought. The mass democratic clone makes clear, in short, that the fear underlying anticloning literature has never been that “persons”—the always deferred future of embryos—might be assaulted. On the contrary, it is that reproduction, as thought, might remain political in the absence of any persons at all. The clone is far from antidemocratic. Its democratic potential, however, lies in the disquieting fact that it opens up politics, irrevocably, to things that can never be persons and that indeed do not desire to be so.
Whereas rethinking embryos and clones as contemplative embryos and contemplative clones helps to incorporate and naturalize into democratic structures things that will never be persons and will never possess dignity, rethinking trash provides a tool for this process of incorporation—and that tool is gender. Indeed, one of the outcomes of taking nonhuman and inorganic life, reproduction, and thought as a democratic norm is that sexuality becomes politically irrelevant while gender takes on enormous political value. The “femininity” of asexual replication and dissipation becomes a touchstone for political engagement—and reproduction and gender together thus become not only important, but fundamental, categories of democratic analysis. It is in fact specifically by recognizing the gendered operations underlying informational and material systems writ large that these systems become political. All systems and all sets of material and informational interactions are, in this context, gendered, and as their gender formulates itself, they become political.
The functional importance of gender identification to these nonhuman, contemplative mass democratic systems does not, of course, mean that classic, human-centered liberal democratic politics does not also identify particular systems—and especially reproductive systems—as specifically gendered (rather than sexed). As the previous chapters have shown, conventional post-eighteenth-century liberal democratic rhetoric has always associated asexual reproduction, death, and trash with femininity. Asexuality was defined, and continues to be defined, as a process that brings an organism closer to death, a process that disqualifies an organism from dignified political participation and, above all, a female process. This association—which effectively defines femininity as death and trash—is obviously an injustice by, once again, conventional liberal democratic standards. But in the alternative framework that has been the interest of this book, a different interpretation of this set of associations can lead to a less gloomy outcome—one that, once more, recognizes gender as the most effective, and perhaps the only, tool for extending and revivifying contemporary democratic engagement.
Recall, for example, that when trash appears in a nonhuman democratic context (or, as much of the ongoing scholarship on rubbish writ large posits, in any democratic context), it ceases to be trash. In a nonhuman political scenario, waste is an impossibility. When gender and, in particular, things gendered female become “trash,” therefore, they are not being devalued. They are, to repeat, and on the contrary, becoming hyperbolically political and functional. Just as asexual reproduction—making copies—is gendered female, and just as death—storage—is gendered female, so too, now, is translating information and matter into more politically relevant taxonomic structures—disposing of trash—gendered female. In short, gender is the operation that allows for effective democratic engagement in this alternative framework. Gendering a system—or excavating the gender of a system—is what incorporates it into democracy, what makes it a participant rather than a nightmare.
Once again, though, for gender identification to achieve this political functionality, readers must, first, accept that gender is a systemic, rather than embodied, set of operations and, second, remain open to a democratic theory that normalizes figures like clones, embryos, and data hoards as nonhuman political actors. Readers must accept, in their present, disembodied, material, and informational form, things that are simultaneously accumulations and environments—and readers must accept them as political players because their reproductive activities are also thought processes rather than moments that initiate the growth of future subjects.
If readers do accept this scenario, then gender identification can be a remarkably productive method of dealing with the ongoing challenges to political engagement—data mining being the most obvious one here—that have been bringing liberal democratic theory to a halt. Even as it reduces the human to a marginal political figure, that is to say, this intellectual mass democracy still has as much to offer embodied, rational subjects who reproduce sexually as it does nonhuman, material, and informational fields and systems. But these embodied, rational subjects must cease to trade on the unquestioned superiority of their cognitive, psychological, and subjective modes of existence and replication. Slime and data must not only be tolerated and patronized, but they must also be respected.
Once this happens, once commentators respect and appreciate, rather than fearing or ridiculing, the political work of slime and data, there might also emerge a more nuanced understanding of what is frequently described in conventional, if not necessarily feminist, theory as the menace of reproduction and the absurdity of thought in contemporary democracies. Reproduction, on the one hand, is ordinarily described in this scholarship as both central to modern democracy and the thing that eludes governance—as the activity in dire need of political regulation but also the activity that, upon being regulated, undermines any coherent democratic norm.5 Thought, on the other hand, is usually derided as, at worst, completely irrelevant to contemporary political practice or, at best, useful to democracy only when distilled into constant speech or chatter.6
In an unbounded, nonhuman democracy, however—in the political world of the slime mold and the data hoard—reproduction and thought are not only functional, but they are the same thing. And, as a result, the dissatisfying dismissal of each that has characterized so much recent literature can cease. Or, put differently, the influential scholarship that, convincingly, demonstrated the importance of reproduction to mass democracy need not be read as scholarship that likewise killed political thought. Quite the opposite—the political centrality of reproduction demands the political centrality of thought.
Or, to conclude from yet a different direction, modern mass democracy—even in its human-centered formulations—is a systemic, environmental practice. It is a set of operations and processes that are embedded in fields, growths, hoards, and accumulations. It is enmeshed in information and matter. As the previous chapters have shown, not a single one of these systems, fields, hoards, accumulations, growths, environments, assemblages, or series of operations is immune to the operation of gender. The gender of these systems, indeed, is what makes them political—what makes them functional in a democratic context. Whereas human-centered political histories and political analyses obscure the vital role that gender plays in democracy, however, a history of democracy that takes the data and matter as its key figures highlights this role. Especially when issues seem irrelevant to “gender” as it is conventionally understood—when the problem is, say, the menace of Boundless Informant—one need only to turn to unbounded, nonhuman politics to excavate the gender operations that underlie these issues. Only engaging in such work can mark the edges its political activities.
Which is not to say, of course, that readers should not take pleasure in the Guardian’s relentlessly human-centric variations on such stories. At the same time, though, if these readers feel a bit sheepish about the apparently irresponsible delight they take in reading about serious, worrisome issues of the NSA data-mining sort, now at least they know why. There are two histories, not one, prowling around underneath this reporting. In addition to the targeting and targeted human subjects, there are also the masses of information, data, matter, and material replicating, coalescing, and transmitting. There is not just the story of human-centered democracy under assault, but also the story of nonhuman democracy growing, flourishing, and functioning. The point in emphasizing this second set of stories is not that readers should simply buckle under to Boundless Informant because it is inevitable anyway. Rather, the point is that readers should think quite a bit more carefully about what that plucky, resourceful Physarum polycephalum is really doing as it creeps incrementally across a Plasticine Africa.