http://tcs.sagepub.com/Theory, Culture & Society

http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/23/2-3/329The online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/026327640602300257

2006 23: 329Theory Culture SocietyPaul Rabinow and Carlo Caduff

After Canguilhem−Life   

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of: 

Theory, Culture and Society

can be found at:Theory, Culture & SocietyAdditional services and information for    

  http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

 

http://tcs.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:  

http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/23/2-3/329.refs.htmlCitations:  

What is This? 

- Jun 9, 2006Version of Record >>

at GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from at GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Problematizing Global Knowledge – Life (Vitalism)/Experience 329

Rose, G. (1984) Dialectic of Nihilism. Oxford: Blackwell.Schutz, A. (1967) Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Simmel, G. (1991) Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Champagne-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Scott Lash is Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, LondonUniversity. He is a long-time collaborator at TCS. His co-authored books include The End ofOrganized Capitalism (1987), Economies of Signs and Space (1994), Reflexive Modernization(1994) and Global Culture Industry (2006).

Life – After CanguilhemPaul Rabinow and Carlo Caduff

Georges Canguilhem’s history of scienceinvestigates life as both form (le vivant) aswell as experience and knowledge of that

form (le vécu). Hinting at James D. Watson andFrancis Crick’s paramount discovery of the doublehelical structure of the deoxyribonucleic acidmolecule, Canguilhem identified in his 1966 essay‘Le concept et la vie’ a shift in the understandingof life. Dropping ‘the vocabulary and concepts ofclassical mechanics, physics and chemistry, . . . infavor of the vocabulary of linguistics andcommunications theory’, life had acquired a newlanguage, Canguilhem observed. Operating withterms such as code, information, instruction,message, meaning, and program, molecular biologyresembled neither natural history, nor architec-ture, nor mechanics; it resembled grammar,semantics and syntax. The problem took a differ-ent form; life was now framed in terms of organiz-ation through information. ‘If we are tounderstand life, its message must be decodedbefore it can be read’, as Canguilhem put it (2000:317). The structuration of matter and the regu-lation of functions was set to be explored on adifferent scale.

In response to the ascendancy of thebiosciences, the completion of the HumanGenome Project, and a series of gene mapping andDNA sequencing initiatives, commentators havetime and again pointed out that a shift hasoccurred in the epistemology of biology. Humanand non-human life, it is argued, is now envisionedat a molecular scale. Recent developments inbioscience and biotechnology have enabled the re-engineering of organisms, organs and cells by way

of manipulating their molecular make-up. Incontemporary biomedicine, the diagnostic andtherapeutic endeavor seems increasingly anchoredat the molecular level. Biology has come to ‘visu-alize life phenomena at the submicroscopic region– between 10–6 and 10–7 cm’, Nikolas Roserecently remarked. For Rose, this momentous shiftof scale amounts to nothing short of a molecular-ization of life. ‘This molecularization was notmerely a matter of the framing of explanations atthe molecular level. Nor was it simply a matter ofthe use of artefacts fabricated at the molecularlevel. It was a reorganization of the gaze of the lifesciences, their institutions, procedures, instru-ments, spaces of operation and forms of capitaliza-tion’, concludes Rose (2001: 13). Tantamount tothe capacity of contemporary biotechnology andbiomedicine to reshape life at a molecular level isthe advent of a new type of biopolitics, or so itseems.

A closer look at contemporary events in post-genomic biology offers a different perspective.Today, we are not witnessing a linear progressiontowards a general molecularization of life, butrather, and more interestingly, inflections of a re-biologization of life. A series of gene mapping andDNA sequencing projects have revealed thegenetic constitution of bacteria, yeast, worms, fliesand chimps. The systematic production ofgenomic data performed on an industrial scale hasgenerated a slew of information. That information,however, has not led to immediate biologicalunderstanding. The problem biologists andbiomedical scientists face today is how to utilizegenomic information to gain biological understand-ing. It has become clear by now that DNAsequence information does not reveal gene regu-lation. The specification of when, where, and forhow long a gene is turned on or off is still missing.Additionally, it is not always possible to deduce

Keywords biology, genomics, information,knowledge.

19_life_062697 10/5/06 10:24 am Page 329

at GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

protein function from DNA sequence information.As Roger Brent, a molecular biologist, pointed outin 2000, ‘the most important observation fromgenome sequence is probably that . . . the functionof between 15% and 40% of the proteins encodedby any genome is not apparent from theirsequence’ (2000: 170). Identification of polymor-phisms in coding sequences, regulatory sites, andsplice junctions often yield more questions thananswers. The function of non-coding regions, andthe consequences of variation in non-codingregions, is unclear.

The recent discovery of non-coding RNA genesthat produce functional RNA molecules ratherthan encoding specific proteins has revealed thelimits of the information paradigm of molecularbiology. Ironically, as Sean R. Eddy (2001)remarks, a considerable class of genes hasremained invisible in the era of complete genomesequences. The mass production of genomic infor-mation, moreover, is prone to errors. Roger Brentmore generally admonishes that ‘genomic data ofall types are typically lower value adding thanthose obtained from classical ad hoc experimentalapproaches; they typically do not immediatelyaddress the questions about regulation, mechan-ism, and decision making that are of greatestinterest to contemporary biologists’ (2000: 173).The problems are explicable on the ground of theconfiguration of the project itself. Brent arguesthat ‘the underlying logic used to make inferencesfrom genomic data [is] in a primitive state charac-teristic of an observational stage of science’ (2000:173). Perhaps, then, the definition of life as infor-mation was tantamount to that observationalmode of biological inquiry.

Today, as is well known, molecular biology re-assembles around functional genomics, proteomicsand transcriptomics. In the emerging world ofpost-genomics, the generation of genomic infor-mation provides the ground for the biologizationof life, making the complex interactions betweencells, systems of cells, multicellular organisms,populations of organisms and their environment afocus of heightened attention. In order to under-stand genomic information, biology reaches outand moves beyond the limits of the molecularscale. It resituates DNA sequences and RNA regu-latory mechanisms within highly differentiatedcellular networks. It shifts attention from linearcausal chains to non-linear dynamics. And it movesfrom deterministic frameworks to probabilisticexplanations. Accordingly, the challenges of post-genomic biology are not only technical, organiz-ational and financial; they are increasinglyscientific. Post-genomic biology is driven not somuch by efforts in decoding DNA sequences, butrather by testing hypothetical propositions in

experimental settings. Electron microscopes,ultracentrifuges, electrophoresis, mass spectrome-try, isotopes and scintillation counters are nowincreasingly utilized not for observational but forexperimental purposes.

Reflecting on the implications of the revolutionunder way in the molecular biology of the 1950sand early 1960s, Canguilhem identified a shift inthe epistemology of biology. The definition of lifeas organization, Canguilhem claimed in 1966, lostground to a new conception: life as information.Today, this conception has not been totally discred-ited, to be sure, but its limits have nonethelessbecome apparent. The accumulation of genomicinformation has not led to immediate biologicalinsight. The very epistemic status of genomic infor-mation is currently shifting from an end to a meansof research: in post-genomic biology genomesequences are used as giant reference tools.Research, moreover, increasingly pays attention tocomplex interactions across multiple scales. Thepast decade, finally, has witnessed an intensificationof the experimental bent of biological inquiry.

Reflecting on the implications of the concep-tualization of life as information, Canguilhem wasreferring to a series of early successes in theendeavor of molecular biology. He was not refer-ring to a particular science when he claimed thatmankind makes mistakes when it chooses thewrong spot for receiving the kind of knowledge itis after. Clearly, that knowledge is only partially tobe found by way of the molecularization of life.Today, biologists are experimenting with a broadrange of spots so as to turn genomic informationinto biological knowledge. Contemporary inflec-tions of the biologization of life are nothing but anattempt to move things around, once again, in adifferent manner, so as to flourish and survive.History has moved on, and history will continue tomove on – and so should our inquiries. Nonethe-less, Canguilhem’s project remains relevant if it istaken as what it was meant to be: a reviving invi-tation to investigate the unexpected emergence ofobjects and the unpredictable reconfiguration offorms as they assemble into an ever-shifting under-standing of life.

References

Brent, Roger (2000) ‘Genomic Biology’, Cell 100:169–83.

Canguilhem, Georges (2000) A Vital Rationalist.New York: Zone Books.

Eddy, Sean R. (2001) ‘Non-Coding RNA Genesand the Modern RNA World’, Nature ReviewsGenetics 2: 919–29.

Rose, Nikolas (2001 ) ‘The Politics of Life Itself ’,Theory, Culture & Society 18(6): 1–30.

330 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)

19_life_062697 10/5/06 10:24 am Page 330

at GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Problematizing Global Knowledge – Life (Vitalism)/Experience 331

Paul Rabinow is a Professor of Anthropology atthe University of California, Berkeley. He iscurrently working on an NSF funded project onthe ‘Global Biopolitics of Security’ with StephenCollier and Andrew Lakoff, located at the Molec-ular Sciences Institute. His work will center onzones of virulence and their regulation under asecurity regime. He is also Director of the Anthro-pology of the Contemporary Research Collabora-tory (ARC).

The Determination of LifeSteven D. Brown

Eight Incommensurable Propositions onthe Determination of ‘Life’

Life is a term which enables the rupture ofexisting categoriesWhen Daniel Dennett claims that evolutionarytheory is akin to a ‘universal acid’ which is capableof corroding extant systems of thought and epis-temic preoccupations, he is merely restating thecentral thrust of vitalism – that the thinking of ‘lifeitself ’ necessarily undercuts established dualisms(e.g. nature/culture; mind/body). The culturalpremium which is accorded to contemporaryDarwinism and to the ‘life sciences’ may be seenas in direct proportion to the extent to which theyare able to present themselves as having takencharge of ‘life itself ’ as a problem. Critical inter-rogators of the life sciences, such as DonnaHaraway, therefore confront the problem ofanalysing a practice which often disappears into itsown gestures of boundary-blurring (a problemwhich she proposes to counter through poetics andreflexivity).

Life is a term which enables the preservationand ‘future proofing’ of existing hierarchiesThe notion of a ‘tree of life’, typically found in highschool biology textbooks, neatly retains the prin-cipal features of the medieval ‘great chain of being’by substituting the ramified branching of acentrifugal movement of evolution away from the‘primeval soup’ for the centripetal movement ofsentience from the lesser beings towards the PrimeMover. Hierarchy is nevertheless retained, wheneither scheme is considered from an implicitnotion of the ‘perfectibility of life’. This latter

notion may be innocuously presented as ‘goodenvironmental fit’. In either case, the logic is onewell described in Deleuze and Guattari’s charac-terization of ‘arboreal thought’.

Life is the object of a superior mechanismAlthough vitalism and mechanism are oftenconsidered as separate poles of thought, the formsof mechanism which emerge in the wake of 20th-century postwar cybernetics authorize themselvesin relation to their ability to grasp ‘life’ as merelythe most complex of a series of imagined mechan-isms. In his popular writing, Norbert Wiener, forinstance, displays such confidence that life iscapable of being rendered as ‘system’ that heproposes an ethical debate on the powers whichare newly accorded to ‘the human’ as a conse-quence. Of the many paradoxes that this creates,surely none is finer than the attempt to restoredignity to the human subject by atomizing itshumanity into the Cantor dust of classicalcommunication theory.

Life is reducible to communicationThe rise of molecular biology is premised, asJacques Monad and François Jacob beautifullydisplay, on the positing of ‘information’ as the basicbiological unit. Which is to say, by holding theterm ‘life’ to be only a folk category whichdenotes the complex ontogeny of coding biologi-cal materials within an emerging functional assem-blage. However, the recognition that suchelementary forms of communication are inter-dependent with ‘noise’ – or, put slightly differ-ently, that much of the genetic ‘junk’ actuallycontributes in hitherto unknown ways to embry-onic development – problematizes the notion thatlife could be reproduced on the basis of com-municative rationalization.

Keywords communication, life, vitalism

Carlo Caduff is a graduate student in the Depart-ment of Anthropology at the University of Cali-fornia, Berkeley. He has co-translated two booksby Paul Rabinow into German: Anthropologie derVernunft. Studien zu Wissenschaft und Lebens-führung (Suhrkamp, 2004) and Was ist Anthro-pologie? (Suhrkamp, 2004). His research focuseson avian influenza as an emergent crisis.

19_life_062697 10/5/06 10:24 am Page 331

at GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIV LIB on September 2, 2014tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from