Future life will be synthetic: About the emergence of engineered life,its promises,prophecies and the formal causalities needed to make sense of them

A social scientist among the bioartists

In 2014–15, I had the opportunity to join an international team composing the artistic component of a European Community-funded consortium called SYNENERGENE and devoted to the study and implementation of synthetic biology. The project was called Making Life, a joint collaboration of the Finnish Society of Bioart with Biofilia – Base for Biological Arts – at Aalto University in Finland and Bio Fiction in Vienna, Austria. ¹ In my application answering the call for participation in the project, I had argued that I had the necessary abilities to contribute to the project, even if a clearly stated goal of my participation was also to conduct fieldwork there.

Bioart was indeed one of the three sites of my ongoing research program entitled ZoeMedia: Contemporary forms of remediation of the living in bioarts and DIY biology. For this research program, I wanted both to study and practice the contemporary forms of remediation of the living, which I saw occurring in two main sites outside of the highly institutionalized and commercial areas of the biotechnological university–industrial complex: bioarts and DIY biology. I had been following the bioarts for a good ten years by then, had read extensively and written a bit about them. I had also started to follow the DIY biology scene, the fablabs and (bio)hackerspaces devoted to the citizen science of biology.

I insisted that, even if my work had been mostly concerned with observation thus far, I felt this would not be enough for this project. I wanted to reclaim my past training as a biologist and get involved in an actual project where writing would not be the only outcome. The Making Life research platform for art and synthetic biology could indeed provide a perfect opportunity to carry out some of the fieldwork I intended to do for this research program and some extremely valuable hands-on experience at a crucial stage of my work. To my surprise – and great pleasure – my arguments convinced the organizers, and in spite of a highly selective process, I was invited to join the team.

Making Life eventually happened as a series of three work periods, which allowed the multidisciplinary group of practitioners to critically engage, in an informed manner, with the socio-cultural, political and ethical ramifications of synthetic biology. A group of 29 Finnish and international participants composed of artists, designers, architects, engineers, scientists and Aalto University students cooperated within the program. The methods consisted of workshops, laboratory sessions and field trips, forums, seminars and lectures. It comprised theoretical as well as hands-on approaches.

The first and second one-week work periods, in May and November of 2014, took place at Biofilia – Base for Biological Arts – of Aalto University. It covered the introduction to synthetic biology, its sciences and technologies, and practical experience in the laboratory. In parallel the group worked on associated questions in art, ecology, ethics and politics. The third work period, in May of 2015, was an intense production session devoted to creating artistic responses and prototypes. It eventually led to an exhibition and a symposium articulating artistic responses to synthetic biology. The exhibition took place on 22 May 2015 at the Lasipalatsi Näyttely gallery in the center of Helsinki and presented artistic responses and prototypes as the first tangible results of the Making Life process. The exhibition also included a selection of videos from the Bio Fiction Science Art Film Festival, which took place in November of 2014 in Vienna, Austria. A symposium, held on 23 May 2015 gave an introduction to synthetic biology, its key technologies, promises and the hype that surrounds it. A key dialogue followed by presentations from four groups of artists discussed issues and questions addressing synthetic biology in relation to society at large.

Four different groups composed from among the workshop participants thus tested concrete approaches for a critical cultural perception of synthetic biology. I was a member of a group composed of four intermedia ² artists: Antti Tenetz, who also presided over the Finnish Bioarts Society at the time; Erich Berger, the main organizer of the Making Life project; Laura Beloff; and Cecilia Jonsson. Our project was initially called The Ironic Biomantic Machine and was eventually exhibited under the title Your Synthetic Future (at the Speed of Light). Because of my relative lack of technical skills, I quickly took the part of writer for our team.

‘Are we going to be window-dressers for synthetic biology?’, was the first rhetorical question Oron Catts, our leader for the first workshop, asked us in lieu of a welcome, the morning of 22 May 2014. Following this injunction, our group decided to focus our piece on the promises of synthetic biology. As a social scientist, I was well at ease with this choice since I was familiar with a whole literature about scientific and technological promises. In anthropology alone, recent years have seen a flourish of contributions to this topic that have influenced my own research: from Mike Fortun’s Promising Genomics (2008), to the seventh supplement to volume 54 of Current Anthropology, devoted to ‘The Anthropology of Potentialities in Biomedicine’ (October 2013). In their introduction to this supplement, Karen-Sue Taussig, Klaus Hoeyer and Stefan Helmreich (2013: S9) quote Richard Tutton (2011: 412), who in turn points to Cynthia Selin’s felicitous statement ‘“those creatures of the future tense” – promise, expectation, speculation, vision, hope, prophecy and anticipation – have become the subject of analysis across the field of STS [Science and Technology Studies, my original field of study] in the past two decades’. According to Tutton, report the editors, a focus on the concept of promise characterizes the North American constellation of scholars among this field – of which I must then be a part. My own work, indeed, has been concerned with the cybernetic promises for a while now. At first I focused on the promises of the computer (see Bardini, 2000), then, I turned to molecular biology.

The promises of synthetic biology

From its inception, synthetic biology has been concerned with promises. Some historians, like Evelyn Fox Keller (2002: 18), even argue that synthetic biology was, from the start, the very promise of biology itself: ‘to many authors writing in the early part of the twentieth century’, she wrote, ‘… the question of what life is was to be answered not by induction but by production, not by analysis but by synthesis.’ ³ Stéphane Leduc, who might not have coined the expression ‘synthetic biology’ (Campos, 2009) but wrote in 1912 the first book with this title, was certainly one of these authors: ‘Biology is a science like any others, subject to the same laws, the same rules, the same evolution; the same methods apply to it. Like other sciences, it must successively be descriptive, analytic, and synthetic’ (Leduc, 1912). Today the promises of synthetic biology still abound, but they are addressing a somewhat more pragmatic purpose: ‘for synthetic biologists’, write the editors of a recent and very visible anthology, ‘biology could be just another material to engineer, its living machines driving twenty-first century progress’. Again, they insist, and evoke ‘this desire … to design biology rather than to understand it’ (Ginsberg et al., 2014: x–xi).

At the same time most biologists, true to their rationalist and mechanist inheritance, still strongly oppose any mention of a potential transcendent designer. They cultivate this desire, which ultimately amounts to this wish for mankind to design its ‘successor’, or more prosaically, for parents to design their babies. In other words: you cannot see purpose or design in life if you attribute it to a transcendant designer (a watchmaker, a great architect, or whatever name you want to grant Him); but now that we, humans, think we have the technological means to (re)design it, life will all be about design. The problem is not design, but the designer: the Gnostic script has been reworked to accommodate us – and especially synthetic biologists among us – in the part of the demiurge. Although I am not dealing with this issue as bioethicists would, I still feel that thinking about biology in terms of design is necessary, especially today.

Let me come back briefly to this sketchy narrative and look at its historical unfolding. ⁴ Design found its way into biology through a long and conflicted history, from St Thomas Aquinas’ (1225–74) fifth way to prove the existence of God, through William Paley’s (1743–1805) ‘natural theology’, and his parable of the watch and the watchmaker, to Charles Darwin’s hesitations and eventual conclusions on adaptation, still showing signs of refusing to look at the universe ‘as the outcome of chance – that is, without design or purpose’ (Darwin, 1959: 395). As Patrick Edward Dove stated in the first recorded use of the expression ‘intelligent design’ in 1856 in The Theory of Human Progression and Natural Probability of a Reign of Justice: ‘If we assume the designer because there is design, we have assumed only a truism; but we have forgotten to establish the most essential proposition, namely, that the adaptation of means to an end is design’ (Dove, 1856: 476–477).

This ‘most essential proposition’, however, is, even today, very problematic. Darwin and his successors had such a problem with it because it is, in fact, quite aporetic, demonstrating an insoluble contradiction between two implicit propositions hidden within this ‘most essential’ one: (1) final causes belong to metaphysics rather than physics and are thus prohibited explanations for the natural sciences, and (2) they are everywhere to be found in nature. The first proposition belongs to the epistemological realm, whereas the second appears to belong to the empirical realm, hence the paradox or the insoluble contradiction: they belong to different orders of ‘logical types’, as Russell and Whitehead would have called them. As Gregory Bateson (1972 [1954]: 198) has put it, however, even if the confusion of logical types does indeed lead to paradoxes of abstraction, without them, ‘Life would then be an endless interchange of stylized messages, a game with rigid rules, unrelieved by change or humor.’

The first proposition is well established in the history of science. Its clearest expression is usually found in Francis Bacon’s 1605 Advancement of Learning: ‘The handling of final causes, mixed with the rest in physical inquiries’, he wrote, ‘hath intercepted the severe and diligent inquiry of all real and physical causes, and given men the occasion to stay upon these satisfactory and specious causes, to the great arrest and prejudice of further discovery.’ No one has better stated this point than Hans Jonas in Phenomenon of Life. In his fantastic ‘Note on anthropomorphism’, he explains that the rejection of final cause is a ‘methodological principle guiding inquiry rather than a statement of ascertained fact issuing from inquiry’ (Jonas, 2001: 34). This methodological principle, in turn, does not contradict proposition 2, that final causes are everywhere in nature; quite the contrary: they are indeed everywhere in nature, and especially in human nature! As Jonas (2001: 35) has it, ‘our very proneness to final explanations makes it suspect’: its exclusion from the realm of acceptable explanations eventually rests on ‘the fundamental assumption’ that nature and human nature essentially differ. However, as Jonas (2001: 35) insists, this assumption is ‘not so much of modern science itself as of modern metaphysics in the interest of science’. Now the irony is that the interest of science might in the end suffer from such care:

the a-priori exclusion of final causes from external reality lay in a dualistic metaphysics which, in the act of exclusion, also saved the truth of the excluded trait in its own native realm. Finalism must have its legitimate seat somewhere whence the idea of it could have derived, and in the dualistic division the essence of man or of life which provides this seat is not yet disowned; it is only dissociated from that of the res extensa. But dualism proved untenable in the face of organic experience … For when dualism departs and the res cogitans in its organic foundation becomes itself part and product of unitary nature, Bacon’s reference of final cause to the ‘nature of man’ ceases to have the extrusive effect it had in the dualistic setting; and finally the doctrine of evolution, now inseparable from modern monism, obliterates any vestige of the dividing line on which the whole argument of contrasting ‘nature’ and ‘man’ rests. (Jonas, 2001: 37)

Since Darwin inflicted upon us humans the second narcissistic wound, and we now know for a fact that we are indeed a part of nature, the exclusion of final causes can no longer rest on our being apart from it: the aporia must find another way to persist. That is exactly what modern biologists, under cybernetic influence, have managed to do.

Incipit emergence, or the invention of programmed purposiveness

Modern biologists, under the hospitable care of the modern synthetic theory of evolution (i.e. Darwinism plus genetics), have managed to repurpose purpose itself. In order to do that, they have invented a new name and new form of causality: teleonomy and circular causality. Pardon my insistence of the ‘modern’ vocable here; I feel vindicated in using it, however, in the sense Peter Sloterdijk gave to it in a text that is fundamental to my own. In ‘The thing about power’, his definition of this vocable stems from ‘the more or less explicit consensus that the age in which we live constitutes an enormous experiment by the primary nations capable of deploying technologies on the subject of the unlimited increase in power and the incessant intensification of life’ (Sloterdijk, 2006: 98). Hence I also make mine his definition of design: ‘seen from the vantage point of an ecology of competences’, he writes, ‘design is nothing other than the able processing of that which we are not able to do … the simulation of sovereignty: Design is if you are able to after all’ (Sloterdijk, 2006: 102).

That being said, the cybernetic invention of teleonomy is indeed both the premise and the promise of a score of (self)design successes, the opening of a new ‘chapter in the epochal novel of enhancement’ (Sloterdijk, 2006: 99). Let me briefly outline the opening of this chapter. This change in the suffix, from logos to nomos, is highly significant. In one sense, teleonomy can be taken as merely synonymous with teleology, but in another sense, the use of suffix -nomy might appear as giving a surplus of intellectual respectability to the process so christened (think about the differences between ‘astrology’ and ‘astronomy’). Indeed, such seems to be the recollection of the man who is usually credited with coining the term:

The apparent inseparability of purpose and consciousness was previously responsible for a major embarrassment and impediment to the biologist that Haldane put in a characteristically pithy way, ‘Teleology is like a mistress to the biologist; he dare not be seen with her in public but cannot live without her.’ It was my intention in 1957 to help get Haldane’s mistress out of the closet by describing her merits as teleonomic rather than teleological. Whether or not that did help (Monod and Davis found it useful!), the commonplace nature of programmable machines at midcentury gave teleology (as teleonomy) complete respectability in the society of biological ideas. The genome was the program of a Turing machine and Darwin’s Demon was the programmer. (Pittendrigh 1993: 20) ⁵

François Jacob, some years later, was even more straightforward in the same pithy way when he claimed, ‘the concept of program has made an honest woman of teleology’ (1973: 8–9). And some more years later, Richard Dawkins re-ascribed this ‘respectability’ to Darwin himself, when he defined teleonomy as ‘the science of adaptation’: ‘In effect, teleonomy is teleology made respectable by Darwin.’ And Dawkins added: ‘This book is in an essay in teleonomy’ (1999 [1982]: 301–302). The notion of ‘programmed purposiveness’ actually reconciles and unites these two claims. It is, in effect, the major tenet of this molecular synthesis that went from Norbert Wiener and his colleagues, through Pittendrigh, Mayr, Jacob and Monod, and eventually to Dawkins.

A 1943 paper by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, entitled ‘Behavior, purpose and teleology’, was no less than the original manifesto for this new conception of teleology based on the notion of negative feedback: teleology became synonymous with feedback-controlled purpose. Wiener and his colleagues were still modern scientists: they did not seek to re-introduce final causes in the explanation; instead, they wanted to reintroduce ‘purpose’ without the burden of sequential causality: ‘Since we consider purposefulness a concept necessary for the understanding of certain modes of behavior’, they wrote, ‘we suggest that a teleological study is useful if it avoids problems of causality and concerns itself merely with an investigation of purpose’ (Rosenblueth, Wiener & Bigelow, 1943: 23). In order to do so, they used another Aristotelian idea on causality, that of circular causality, where ‘some things cause each other reciprocally, e.g. hard work causes fitness and vice versa’. Aristotle, however, had insisted that in such a case, the reciprocity was asymmetric: ‘but again not in the same way, but the one as end, the other as the origin of change’. ⁶ They obviously did not bother with this proviso, nor did the biologists who followed their lead.

Ernst Mayr might have first enunciated the new notion of ‘programmed purposiveness’. In a 1961 paper entitled ‘Cause and effect in biology: Kinds of causes, predictability, and teleology are viewed by a practicing biologist’, he adopted Pittendrigh’s term, but offered a key precision: ‘it would seem useful to rigidly restrict the term teleonomic to systems operating on the basis of a program of coded information’ (Mayr, 1961: 1504). This was a particularly shrewd move because it entailed considering that life has a purpose resulting from the functioning of a program that appeared prior to the purpose: in other words, purpose is here a descriptive rather than a prescriptive notion. This is exactly in tune with the cybernetic redefinition of purpose as programmed purposiveness, and as such it had a crucial consequence for the ontology founding the research program of molecular biology: it enshrined the metaphor of DNA qua program.

From then on François Jacob could rightly announce, ‘Today biology is concerned with the algorithms of the living world’ (Jacob, 1973: 300), inasmuch as the notion of a ‘genetic program’ had become the central tenet of the new paradigm of molecular biology. In this worldview, we are, and life is, the expression of a program: we are teleonomic beings, inasmuch as teleonomy differs from teleology by this crucial difference: the purpose, the end, is not given from the start, it emerges from the functioning of a program. Controlling the living program, favoring some emergences rather than others, might in the end summarize the main promise of synthetic biology.

Human error and the prophetic machine

As surely as progress eventually became the cardinal principle of modernity, the anticipation, nay, the technological conjuration of progress, lies even more deeply in the modern psyche. When we decided that we could actually be that rational, we turned to the machine to make it happen and shouted ek-statically, ‘I wish by God these calculations could be made by steam!’ (Charles Babbage) The (difference) engines of progress, no less: to get rid of human errors by mechanical means.

Dominic Pettman (2011: 34) insists, and rightly so, that, ‘human error is evident wherever human eyes care to look without the rose-tinted lenses bequeathed to us by our forefathers’. Turning to synthetic biologists’ desire to engineer life, it appears to me that one could even go one step further: it is as if the trouble for them was biology (or alternatively life) itself. ‘Although the hallmarks of optimal functionality can be seen throughout biology’, wrote Dan Tawfik (2010: 692), ‘there are also clear-cut indications that biology is messy and, at times, even sloppy. In other words, the accuracy and fidelity of biological systems are limited.’ But it does not stop there.

Synthetic biologists want to improve on genetic engineering: in their eyes, it is still too much of a craft, their goal is to make it more systematic, functional, efficient, cheaper, but ultimately more ‘predictable’ (Ginsberg et al., 2014: x). The will to (re)design or enhance life indeed supposes some sense of anticipation: the science of heredity turned upside-down. Genetic engineering is also a kind of prophetic technology: given this instance of a ‘genetic message’, given a normal functioning of the ‘genetic program’, one should obtain a certain result (that given body, and maybe even that certain mind). As Craig Venter put it, ‘we have, in truth, learned nothing from the genome other than probabilities’ (Spiegel, 2010).

These probabilities, turned into indexes of risks (of pathology, mainly, or paternity, maybe), became a new Eldorado for a score of enterprises ready to cash on them – think 23andMe, which offers to help you know yourself, ‘where ancestry and health [now] start’, no less. ⁷ This has not escaped the attention of some of my colleagues, first among them Margaret Lock. In a paper titled ‘The eclipse of the gene and the return of divination’, she observed that the eclipse of the genotype/phenotype dogma in molecular biology and the recent advances in the field of epigenetics directly challenged genetic determinism to the point where ‘this probabilistic information – this divination of the future – has no clinical or personal utility but nevertheless inevitably has the allure of “future promise”‘ (Lock, 2005: S52).

There is a fine line between conjuration, advocacy, prediction, anticipation and hope. Usually all these processes are put in relation to the contingency of the future: remember Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’ (Agamben, 1999: 266). When the religious is disqualified, there remains the mantic, its prophetic function. For all technology requires a kind of act of faith: in order to use a specific artifact, one must believe that it will do the job at hand. Technologies are quintessential teleological devices, and the intention to use them is but the flipside of their purpose – when they actually work. Final cause is the bottom line of any technological artifact: to use them is to conjure up their workings. It is from this crucial paradox that Your Synthetic Future takes all its sense. But what if the mantic function could deal with the future contingents (which are neither necessary nor impossible) on an alternating mode, forever oscillating between prophecy and production, poësis? It is basically what we proposed with this piece; that, and to minimize the human error in the mantic process. We, hence, built an apparatus to reveal Your Synthetic Future.

Hans-Georg Gadamer (2006: 19) once considered that ‘hermeneutics is a mantic art involved in the translation of the unintelligible into the intelligible. However, within modern contexts the term possesses a more methodological sense – “a universal doctrine for the interpretation of signs”.’ Traditionally the mantic arts have often made use of animals either in parts (as in aruspicina, with the study of entrails, or patilomancy, with the study of excrement), or through the study of their behavior (also known as theriomancy or zoomancy). In Northern America, our desire for an early spring is infirmed or confirmed in advance each year with the help of a well-managed session of groundhogomancy. Our piece modestly proposes to add to this long-lasting series of well-established cultural practices through the careful staging of SyntheticEcoMancy.

In fact, we have built a biocomputing machine, which, without any human interpretation required, answers directly to the questions raised by the contingent futures of synthetic biology. It is crucial to us to eliminate the human source of errors and to let synthetic life itself, in spite of, or maybe thanks to, its infantile stage of development, answer these questions. Our apparatus is thus an automatized mantic machine: there is no human mediation, no operator, between the answers provided by the synthetic ecologies displayed in our apparatus and the truth-seeker, the questioner. The seer is the living apparatus, directly interfacing with the future seeker.

Fake it until you make it

In a preliminary design for the piece, we had planned to have the question of the visitor translated and transduced into direct movement of magnetotactic bacteria. The questions would have been spoken out loud into a microphone and then translated into instructions to move a set of motorized permanent magnets located beside the microscope plate, much higher in amplitude (up to 50mT) than that of the earth magnetic field. Magnetotactic bacteria are self-propellant bacteria with an internal chain of magnetic Fe3O4 crystals. This chain passively aligns them to external magnetic fields, which they exploit in nature to find their desired water depth with the right oxygen concentration. In our preliminary design, the bacteria would have been placed in a microfluidic device consisting in shallow glass channels of 5 micrometers. Our system would have been able to track the trajectories of many bacteria at once with high spatial and temporal accuracy. We had thus planned to use the behavior of magnetotactic bacteria as the ironic engine of our piece, because – and here the project became rapidly twicely ironic – we could coerce them into ‘doing the prophetic job’.

When it became clear that this would not happen, thanks to some human errors of course, we had to change our plans, and to make, as the great albeit popular philosopher Michael Jordan once said, failure the engine of our success. ⁸ This was when we realized that having a digital ecology at the center of the piece was actually truer to the most crucial promise of contemporary synthetic biology, the digitizing of life itself. This realization did not come easily to us, though. I was its unlucky medium when, after two despairing days waiting for our bacterial culture, three days before the exhibition opening, I suggested to my colleagues that we might as well ‘fake’ the bacteria. By that, I meant, I explained, replace the magnetotactic bacteria with some sort of digital representation. Their reaction was not exactly positive that night: all of them usually take pride in performing some sort of post-representational work (Hauser, 2008). They are bioartists, after all. Troubled silence ensued. We went to bed on that sad note.

The issue was resolved the next morning, however, when Erich Berger, who was also in charge of the whole project for the Finnish Society of Bioart, intercepted me even before I could put my breakfast tray on the table and sit: ‘it’s not faking if you take the problem head front!’, he offered to my puzzlement. I was not exactly awake, so it took the whole breakfast meeting to make sense of this statement: it is not faking, indeed, if the digital creatures are not representations, i.e. if they do not stand for something other than themselves.

In the version of our piece that eventually got exhibited, we thus introduced a digital ecology consisting of flocking creatures made of chains of icons borrowed from the graphical language of an open source DNA editor (a free CRISPR). In our system at rest, the analog and the digital ecologies mingle: the digital creatures flock and follow the analog ones. When the visitor asks his or her question aloud in a microphone, the two ecologies are disconnected, and the flocking behavior in the synthetic ecology is guided toward one quadrant of the screen, arbitrarily assigned to one out of four possible answers: yes, no, probably no and maybe yes. Instead of reacting to the analog creatures of the live medium, the digital creatures react to the analog waves of the visitor’s voice. Their behavior becomes personal.

In order to do this, we have thus recycled a device used in spiritualism séances: our apparatus answers the question of a visitor through the mediation of a schematic OuiJa board, also known as a spirit or talking board. It is a flat board usually marked with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘hello’ (occasionally) and ‘goodbye’, along with various symbols and graphics. The classic design uses a small heart-shaped piece of wood or plastic as a movable indicator to indicate the spirit’s message by spelling it out on the board during a séance. We made no use of such a planchette in our design, since the bacteria would directly move over the board (a hole in it allows one to look directly at a screen) to provide their answer. We thus avoid the usual criticism of the scientific community, which has long held that ‘the action of the board can be parsimoniously explained by unconscious movements of those controlling the pointer, a psychophysiological phenomenon known as the ideomotor effect’. ⁹

Ultimately our apparatus also closes the loop of the history of computing. While Leibniz allegedly invented the very idea of a universal characteristic and thus re-invented the binary language on the well-documented cultural instances of computation and permutation provided by sikidy (a geomantic technique from Madagascar, see Skinner, 1980: 4) and the Chinese Yi Jing, we quite simply inverted this historical trajectory to let a modern day (bio)computer tell us about the contingent futures of Life Itself (this cliché of our times). The piece encouraged the visitors to reflect on the contingent futures of synthetic biology: its main value is in the questions themselves.

The next mutation will be metaphysical

In our Jordanesque effort to turn our failure to bring living bacteria into the very engine of our success, we realized concretely that the most original claim of synthetic biology lies in its ability to breach the once clear and impenetrable metaphysical boundary that has kept apart the analog and digital modes of existence. We thus definitely opposed Michel Houellebecq’s famous claim in Elementary Particles according to which ‘the next mutation will be genetic’ (Houellebecq, 2000: 262).

A few words of caution are needed here. When I write mode of existence, I do not mean, as goes the contemporary confusion, world. Moreover, when I write analog, I do not mean real, and when I write digital, I do not mean virtual. In other words, I am not referring to an alleged boundary between the real and the virtual worlds, quite simply because to me there is only one world, where digital beings are as real as analog ones. Digital beings, usually experienced through some sort of computerized apparatus, are as real – as actual or potential – as material, energetic and, dare I say, even as spiritual as any analog beings may be. No more, no less. Digital beings and analog beings merely inhabit the world in different ways, they correspond to different modes of existence. ¹⁰ Again it seems to me that it is exactly what J. Craig Venter means when he says that he (and his colleagues) wants to digitize biology:

There’s now little distinction between computer code and genetic code, and we readily convert one into another. So when we see what’s a genome we’re converting what we call the analogue DNA code into digital code. I’ve described that as digitizing biology. (Mayer, 2012)

Here another argument is needed to finally convey my point: an argument about the changing status of models in contemporary scientific and engineering practices. A model, whether analog or digital, used to be considered as a more or less adequate, because simplified, representation of reality. R.F. Steidel and J.M. Henderson, for instance, stuck to this conception when they wrote, ‘[Modeling] is the means we use to ignore what we cannot understand and to consider what we can understand. The use of models allows us to simulate unfamiliar problems by replacing the unfamiliar with the familiar’ (Steidel & Henderson, 1983: 345). Nowadays, thanks to the efforts of computer scientists, engineers, molecular biologists, bioinformaticians, complexity theoreticians and every other child of the cybernetic age, models have become reality in the making.

In Your Synthetic Future, the digital creatures exhibit programmed purposiveness, putting their own version of our teleonomic nature in the service of answering the visitors’ questions about the contingent futures of life itself. As such they demonstrate a squaring – a romanticization, Novalis would have said – of the very processes of emergence they concretize: their own teleonomic behavior is but a mirror of ours. In the ironic move of translating the questions into their own movement, they make of the appearance of purpose the only true question. What if, the installation asks, the very passage from analog to digital was the mutation itself?

From the start, molecular biology developed on Schrödinger’s intuition that ‘the chromosome contains in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual’s future development and of its functioning in the mature state … the chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. They are law-code and executive power – or, to use another simile, they are the architect plan and builder’s craft – in one’ (Shrödinger, 1992 [1944]: 21–22). When code-script turned into the program (see Kay, 2000), the notion of a plan, or a blueprint, remained, even if epigenetics, among other advances in biology, has proven that ‘genetic determinism, symbolized by the blueprint concept, had become a misconception’ (Zwart, 2009: 160). The invention of programmed purposiveness has somehow bracketed this misconception: there is no determinism at work here, no final cause, if the blueprint emerges in the process like a model understood as reality in the making. At some deeper level, however, the metaphysical problem persists.

The contemporary convergence of code, which creates a porous boundary between analog and digital modes of existence, re-articulates the relation between matter and finality in the alleged absence of materiality for one of the two terms. What is at stake here is the understanding of the conditions of possibility, material or other, of new forms of presence across the analog/digital divide, at this epochal moment when the digitization of life has closed the cybernetic loop on them. For lack of space, I will jump here to a conclusive speculation: these new forms of presence ought to be considered as medium and message, data and process, all in one. Like the substantial forms of old, their conditions of possibility should be investigated with a renewed interest for the formal causes of their modes of existence:

To understand life is to recognize its ineluctable finality as Aristotle intended it and to recognize its thoroughgoing materiality – but how to relate the two? For Aristotle the best solution was to understand the primacy of ‘substantial forms’, that is, the fusion of formal and final cause, within nature as that which captures and shapes and animates materiality from within. Form and finality are inextricably linked in the living organism, and immanent in nature. (Moss, 2009: 105)

The reference to ‘medium and message’, of course, alludes to Marshall McLuhan’s most famous aphorism: the medium is the message. The irony of this statement is that it usually generates the kind of incomprehension that has led many a critic to accuse McLuhan of technological determinism – a kind of pleonasm if one follows my previous argument about the teleological nature of any given technology. Moreover, it allows making another point about the formal causes at work with these new hybrid forms of presence:

McLuhan, along with other media ecology scholars, has been accused of being a technological determinist. And while technological determinism has largely been used as a straw man argument to dismiss McLuhan and others without due consideration, the deterministic language of cause-and-effect is easy enough to slip into, by force of habit, and for wont of easily accessible alternatives. Thus we may end up with statements like, the stirrup caused feudalism as a shorthand, in the same way that we might say evolution caused us to walk erect. For media ecologists and biologist alike, we understand that this kind of language is a form of shorthand, and a kind of poetry, used to represent much more complex processes. That complexity can better be represented by the concept of formal cause, rather than cause-and-effect (otherwise known as efficient cause); formal cause is the causality of emergent proprieties. (Strate, 2011: ix–x)

The evocation in the same line of ‘media ecologists and biologists alike’ is far from accidental: in both cases, the answer to accusations of determinism is to make the critic understand his confusion of different causalities: emergent processes need formal causal explanations rather than efficient or final ones. In the fourth chapter of his McLuhan Misunderstood, titled ‘McLuhan and causality: Technological determinism, formal cause and emergence’, Robert Logan (2013) pushes the argument one notch further when he discusses the different senses of the formal cause in McLuhan and Aristotle to conclude that McLuhan’s version is a way to talk about emergence without having the proper vocabulary yet, rather than a proper use of Aristotle’s version of it. On the other hand, on the side of biology, Mariusz Tabaczek (2013) has shown that, if the theory of emergence does not present a consistent definition of downward causation in biology and evolution, this problem can be overcome only if downward causation is understood in terms of formal rather than efficient causation. ¹¹ Whatever the case may be, the link between emergence and formal cause cannot be neglected.

In his text for Entry Paradise, Peter Sloterdijk (2006: 99; my emphases) refers twice to the fact that in this ‘epochal novel of enhancement … emperor and citizens are both media of the autonomous spiral of power … modern individuals are discreet media of power’. Could late modern humans’ aspiration to self-design be construed as merely another form of participation in the autonomous spiral of power, participation by other means? Twice media: our new ontogenetic condition; media of power, discreet, i.e. digital; media of our own making. Indeed, the next mutation is already metaphysical.