From Genes to Memes: Ollivier Dyens and the Scientific Posthumanism of Darwinian Evolution

In this chapter, I elaborate a notion of technological posthumanism that is predicated on understanding information—specifically replicable data—as the dominant term in relations between culture and technology. To exemplify this perspective, I focus my argument on the theoretical work of Ollivier Dyens, particularly his book Metal and Flesh. To begin, the chapter emphasizes Dyens’s redefinition of the body as a cultural entity, drawing out both the connections and points of departure that this understanding shares with Richard Dawkins’s (in)famous “selfish gene” argument and particularly focusing on this perspective’s rendering of life in terms of probabilistic functions. Having thus established the terrain of engagement, the chapter proceeds to consider this construction technologically, going in search of its hauntologies to ask what is foreclosed by the positive definition of life espoused by Dyens and Dawkins. From the doubled movements of this inquiry (where life is both a subject and an object of analysis), the chapter argues that Dyens’s posthumanism—precisely in its constative claims to scientificity—performs a deconstruction of scientific materiality, namely, the claim that scientific data are measurable, repeatable, and falsifiable. Specifically, Metal and Flesh’s deconstruction of the human slides back to deconstruct the scientific tenets of evolution itself: scientific posthumanism is thus a site where science is no longer scientific and where the scientific presumptions that underwrite Darwinian evolution are desublimated.1 However, since Dyens’s thought is itself predicated on the truth claims of this scientific frame, I ultimately argue that scientific posthumanism is trapped within a nihilistic framework of its own making.

Why Ollivier Dyens? There is, of course, the content of his work, which has made important contributions to the field of technological posthumanism: his presentations of a robust selection of posthuman scholarship in the forms of a Google Earth skin2 and a multimedia web database,3 for example, are all the more important considering the tendency of research in this area to proliferate through diverse channels (even more so than in conventional scholarly disciplines). Moreover, Dyens’s contributions as a digital poet nominate him as someone whose theoretical writing connects to a mind that is sensitive to the vagaries of artistic practices. Most important to this project, though, is Dyens’s intensification of Dawkins’s reading of Darwinian evolution, a trait that distinguishes Metal and Flesh as a promising place to begin deconstructing those principles’ implicit values: what unmarked privileges are hidden in the effort to uncover laws of reproduction? Finally, while Dyens’s work is peripheral to the discourse of evolution—in part because Metal and Flesh flouts many of the conventions of scholarly writing—this marginality is an asset inasmuch as it denaturalizes the apparent neutrality of evolutionary principles, revealing the scientific claims to neutrality that ground evolution’s narrative.

With respect to this latter point, an important thread throughout this chapter is the observation that the materially nonprogressivist stance of science belies a profound discursive progressivism. Specifically, science’s refusal to identify change with progress in the phenomena it observes is undercut by its larger-scale faith in a progressive expansion of human knowledge. In this context, Dyens’s deployment of evolution exposes the tension between science’s recognition that progress is only one way of accounting for phenomenal changes and its larger insistence that all discoveries contribute to (a narrative of) human progress. Once visible, this tension itself undercuts the claims to neutrality of Darwinian evolution so that Dyens’s thought turns back to rewrite itself as having sublimated its own contingency.

The primary objective of Metal and Flesh is to redefine the human body as a cultural entity, and this redefinition hinges on two key observations: first, that survival and reproduction are processes that take place at a level below that of the species or individual, and second, that these processes—in the context of ubiquitous media technologies—have detached from the genetic biology that had formerly determined them. In short, Dyens argues that humans are the by-product of reproductive processes that have historically been represented genetically but that are now represented culturally in the form of information (broadly understood). Simply put, if all bodies survive by replicating, cultural bodies are bodies whose reproduction is dominated by nongenetic replication.

Fundamentally, this notion of cultural bodies is an extrapolation of Dawkins’s populist argument that genes operate “selfishly.” In its most basic form, Dawkins’s theory reiterates Darwin’s insistence that evolution is an essentially genetic process: genetic traits that—for whatever reasons—optimize longevity and reproduction are more likely to remain active in the biological economy. For Dawkins, this is emphatically not a moral or ideological claim but simply a description of fact: what is present today indicates the things in the past that were most likely to survive. As a result, Dawkins repeatedly insists that genes do not behave “selfishly” in a subjective sense but rather in a behavioral sense; that is, they have the effect of improving their own survival prospects. The common mistake, Dawkins argues, is to think that our subjective intentions are somehow detached from our genetic biology, which is to say that the mistake lies in thinking that our will—expressed through categories of thought—is the cause of our embodied actions. In contrast, Dawkins advocates acknowledging thoughts themselves as a means of genetic survival.

This aspect of Dawkins’s thought has proved to be fecund material for numerous and diverse scholars over the last forty years and has contributed—along with the related inter-, extra-, and multidisciplinary work on “complexity” carried out at the Santa Fe Institute (since 1984) and elsewhere—to a migration of disciplines like cognitive science to questions that have traditionally been the province of the humanities. For example, a recent post by John Doris to the National Humanities Center’s “On the Human” forum cites a variety of studies that each suggest, in different ways, that a sizable portion of our justificatory thinking (with respect to decision making) is done only after a decision has already been made. In the most striking such example, Doris recounts a study in which participants consistently failed to detect mismatches between intentions and outcomes in a simple decision task: they were asked to make a decision of preference between two pictures of human beings but were subsequently offered (through sleight of hand) the image that they did not choose as though it were the one that they did. Interestingly, the switch was detected less than 26 percent of the time, a rate that remained consistent regardless of the degree of similarity between the paired images (though, to be fair, the varying “degrees of similarity” were constrained to “normal,” “healthy” humans). Moreover, when asked to explain their choices, the explanations of the duped participants (who were still unaware of the sleight of hand) were effectively indistinguishable from the explanations of the control group: there was no indication “such as evidence of deceit or hesitation, to differentiate the reasons participants [gave] for the choices they did make from the reasons they [gave] for the choices they didn’t make.”4 This leads Doris to conclude that “though they didn’t know what they did, they had no trouble coming up with reasons why they did it.”5

For humanities scholars, this example may suggest an operation of the Freudian unconscious in which the experiment’s conductor is lent an authority akin to that of a “subject presumed to know.”6 In Dawkins, though, such findings were anticipated in a different register through his emphasis on the formal operation of replication, which he takes to be “the ultimate rationale for our existence.”7 In this view, we must first understand individuals as the “survival machines” of replicators; genes are the most relevant type of replicator because they are the smallest unit in a nested hierarchy and because they are the most abundant decipherable division of biological matter. That is, because genes are subsets of cells, which are subsets of individuals, and so on, they represent the stratum of biology capable of the most influential and nuanced interactions. Thus the point, for Dawkins, is that evolved characteristics in species and individuals come about as the result of successful genetic reproduction rather than individual species’ mutation.8 Genes are said to express themselves, then, and their successes in doing so are registered as characteristics: it isn’t that opposable thumbs, for example, evolved to allow us to text message more efficiently but rather that human bodies were the optimal carrier for the opposable thumbs genetic combination—itself the most optimal carrier for its constitutive genes—as well as the optimal carrier for whatever genetic combination is expressed in text messaging. For Dawkins, genes are thus constitutively “selfish” simply because they are the basis for the complex hierarchy of biological life, including the much-vaunted decision-making skills that inform our actions.

However, Dawkins begins to trouble this neat and tidy picture of evolution in the final chapter of The Selfish Gene, where he notes that biology is not the only medium of evolutionary processes. Citing in particular the “analogy between cultural and genetic evolution,”9 he further remarks that it even appears that culture is “achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.”10 As a result, Dawkins insists that, while “DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about [for more than three thousand million years], it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time.”11 It follows, then, that a robust account of evolution cannot foreclose the possible emergence of new types of replicators.

Dawkins coins the term meme to account for such replicators as they are found in the cultural realm, a nomination that specifically designates a “unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.”12 A meme might manifest in any number of forms, ranging from a fragment of a symphonic theme to an idea, a fashion, a way of cooking rice, or virtually anything else; the key point is that memes propagate in the meme pool by “leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”13 As such, memes in a meme pool are equivalent to genes in a gene pool so that the two forms of replicators compete with one another for evolutionary superordination. In the context of Dawkins’s larger project of evolution advocacy, the point to note here is that—somewhat paradoxically—the existence of these nongenetic replicators actually strengthens his overall genetic argument because they naturalize the evolutionary process (specifically, a hierarchically structured reading of Darwin’s theory of natural selection) as a process rather than as an ontological claim.

Thus memes mark Dyens’s point of entrance into Dawkins’s thought because they allow for constitutions of life that are entangled with biology but that do not necessarily spring from it. That is, Dyens’s cultural bodies merge ideology and biology such that Metal and Flesh postulates “an ontological essence for the body as a semiotic interface to the complexity . . . of information ecosystems.”14 As a result, though genetics and memetics each unfold in distinct ontological strata, they nonetheless combine via their shared reliance on informatic reproductive processes (informatic in the sense that they are taken to be composed of discrete units of data, be they biological or cultural). From the perspective of cultural bodies, then, technology, culture, and biology are simultaneously distinct and inseparable from one another.15

Important to this perspective is a definition of culture that moves away from the term’s conventional usage toward the sense captured by Dawkins’s notion of memes. Accordingly, culture, for Dyens, is “any piece of information that can reproduce and disseminate without making direct use of genetic channels.”16 Moreover, culture is not limited to human activity but instead includes “any trace left in the environment by a living being.”17 Employing these two principles in tandem, then, Dyens’s notion of culture includes books, songs, and myths (for example) but also nests, scents, and the flight paths of migratory birds. To say that bodies are cultural is thus to describe them as entanglements of multiple, autonomous strata that each behaves according to its own particular logic, a perspective that aligns with Hayles’s description of her subjective agency as the site at which multiple agents collide.18 Although this assertion has obtained to some extent throughout history, the current ubiquity of media technologies makes it especially true for our present era. Moreover, this quantitative shift is accompanied by an equally compelling qualitative shift in the realities that media convey, leading Dyens to note that because today’s technologies “offer us access to new levels of reality that our biology cannot perceive, define, or understand by itself,”19 the intensity of cultural bodies’ frequent encounters with simultaneous levels of reality that are constituted through contradicting absolutes is significantly higher than it has historically been (and is continually increasing).

Dyens’s emphasis on the intensification that takes place in contemporary technoculture leads him to argue that the accent in cultural bodies has now shifted from embodiment to culture. That is, Dyens argues that memes proliferate cultures but that these cultures are qualitatively changed by this multiplication; human cultural artifacts, for example, are no longer definitively human and are thus no longer even artifacts (in the proper sense) but instead take on a life of their own. Moreover, this logic feeds back to reconstruct humanity: the conventional assignation of mastery to life over objects is dramatically reconfigured when objects themselves become alive. In this respect, Dyens echoes visions of technological society offered by Arthur Kroker and Langdon Winner, where the former argues that individuals are possessed by virtual reality20 and the latter promotes “technological somnambulism” as the way to understand our ignorance of the fact that we are being remade from the inside out.21 In effect, Dyens argues that “culture saps the biological environment not because it is intrinsically negative or ill-willed, but because it gives replicators the ability to bypass organic matter and biological channels.”22 Indeed, Dyens even goes as far as to suggest that the current state of environmental crisis is a result of this transformation of the biosphere.23

Consequent to this perspective, Dyens follows Dawkins in registering life in the positive terms of a probability function rather than as a categorical distinction between life and death. That is, life is defined (in Metal and Flesh) in terms of what persists, and what persists is a function of how life reproduces itself. Rather than existing within the category of either life or nonlife, then, the life of cultural bodies lives on a continuum. That is, not only does “the structure that allows us to positively differentiate between life and non-life”24 elude us but it eludes us precisely because nonlife is excluded from the definition of life, which registers living-ness on a continuum based on the probability and rate of genetic or memetic replication.

Because such a continuum is defined by interactions (i.e., rates of replication and survival) rather than categorical distinctions, it follows that it does not really pertain to life and death per se but is rather an indication of a particular organism’s degree of complexity. As Dyens explains,

the implication of this morphing of the human body into a cultural one is that no living body can be singled out. Each body is several living ones simultaneously . . . so that phenomena seem to distinguish themselves according to their degree of complexity, not according to absolutes like life and death.25

Crucially, then, life is divested of any de facto value or identity and is instead symptomatic of complex interactions (between genes, memes, or both).

Clearly this construction of life risks tautology when it is considered alongside the evolutionary theory from which it sprang: life is defined in terms of the ability to survive (through replication), but survival itself is divorced from any necessary ties to organic life and is measured instead—post factum—as that which has persisted through the process of evolution. That is, life is that which persists over time in an economy of replication, but replication itself is considered a fundamental activity of living so that we are left with the intention–outcome experiment that Doris cites, without even the alibi of having chosen (because life is naturalized).26 This line of critique has, of course, been leveled at Darwinian evolution more generally: for example, during a recent lecture at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Jerry Fodor indicated tautology as a crucial flaw in the Darwinian perspective because it means that evolution does not support counterfactuals (i.e. “this is what would have happened if that had happened”) in the way that, for example, Newton’s does.27 Furthermore, as Stevan Harnad points out in his response to Fodor, this criticism is not usually even disputed by Darwinians, who are apt to argue that Darwin’s contribution is to offer a perspective that—in being categorically true—yields crucial methodological consequences28 rather than optimizing any particular (mechanical) effects.29 The crucial point, in the context of the argument being presented here, is that both supporters and detractors of Darwinian evolution agree that tautology is (at the very least) a proximate concern. Without entering the debate regarding the facts of Darwinian evolution, then, we can observe that perspectives that result from this understanding—perspectives that seek to turn these methodological consequences into optimized mechanical effects—have at their core, necessarily, a claim to originary and unambiguous truth. That is, Darwinian evolution may not be methodologically tautological in its descriptions, but extrapolating its principles to a predictive or categorical framework—that is, to define what life is now or soon will be—is an activity that is either tautological (in that its very essence reveals itself to be true), predicated on a naive objectivity (in that its truth claims are expressed through the “neutrality” of an observer), or a mixture of both.

From this observation, then, we can construe evolution in its categorical and predictive framework as always-already separated from its etymology as a verb—the Latin evolutio, for “unrolling,” from evolvere, “to become a simple statement of fact,” namely, that that which exists, exists. Dawkins is sensitive to this danger and attempts to evade it by insisting on the role of empirical data in selfish gene theory. Thus, for example, he offers the following in The Selfish Gene:

If you look at the way natural selection works, it seems to follow that anything that has evolved by natural selection should be selfish. Therefore we must expect that when we go and look at the behavior of baboons, humans, and all other living creatures, we shall find it to be selfish. If we find that our expectation is wrong, if we observe that human behavior is truly altruistic, then we shall be faced with something puzzling, something that needs explaining.30

In the italicized section, Dawkins fuses the objectivity of empiricism with the subjectivity of expectations and predictions, rhetorically promoting the claims to neutrality of the former onto the latter. Indeed, Dyens’s intensification of memes demonstrates the speciousness of this argument because its posthumanist orientation results from memes not being subject to empirical data collection in the same way that genes are (because their material boundaries are less clearly delineated).

The question, then, is not whether there is a tautology but rather where this tautology is located and what it services. Put differently, what is the technology of a tautological definition of life? The immediate answer to this question is that life becomes, for Dawkins, a second-order simulation, where the distinction between “life” and “life itself” begins to break down.31 That is, Dawkins constructs subjective agency as an exclusive function of genetic processes (i.e., agency is simply a genetic survival mechanism), which is to say that subjectivity is completely determined by genetic activity. Indeed, any mobilization of selfish gene theory—that is, any movement of the theory beyond a simple statement of fact—must account not only for subjective agency (as Dawkins does, by positioning it as an offshoot of genetic activity) but also for the particular overdeterminations that spring from each specific narrative iteration of this theory. That is, though Dawkins’s recourse to the objective materiality of science sidesteps (to an extent) the risk of tautology, this sidestepping itself instantiates a version of science that is lent a narrative authority that directly undermines this objectivity, since it is now subjectively oriented (i.e., it is a narrative). Indeed, Dawkins seems to be attuned to this slipperiness, which leads him to repeatedly insist that the grammar of terms such as survival mechanism is actually misleadingly subjective because mechanism implies a genetic agency rather than a probabilistic function. However, the fact remains that this grammar is necessary for his observations to narrate, which in turn is necessary for them to speak outside of their tautological dimension. Thus, if Dawkins is untroubled by questions of subjective fatalism (which his emphasis on the amorality of selfish gene theory strongly suggests), this may simply be because he fails to avow the technological component of his own thought.

In this context, Dyens’s movement from genes to memes can be read as a corrective of this failing: memes set the trajectory for Dyens’s departure from Dawkins as much as they mark his entrance into Dawkins’s worldview. In this sense, Metal and Flesh charts the migration of life from second- to third-order simulation, where the process of life precedes its instantiation and precludes recourse to a biological real. That is, by extending the language of biological probability (through which Dawkins renders individuals) to include “cultural” human behaviors, the highly specified language of genetics paradoxically multiplies. Because these behaviors have their own languages and metrics of survival, survival itself is reconfigured in a way that undermines the specific examples through which it was initially defined; the (abstract) reproductive process of survival is privileged over any particular instance of it and over any identity produced by it. As a result, the question arises: what happens when memes no longer operate analogously to genes but instead act in tandem with genes in relation to a third term, the privileged process of replication? Moreover, in the context of a “mediascape”32 that convincingly naturalizes memes, is it possible that memes have come to dominate genes even within their pairing? If this is the case, what new forms emerge from these newly contingent genes?

To describe dyens’s cultural bodies in the preceding terms is already to begin to think them technologically in that the memetic process that produces cultural bodies is an “extension” of the genetic technology that grounds Dawkins’s narration of biological bodies. What, though, of the remaining three intensities of McLuhan’s fourfold? To understand cultural bodies as technologies of (posthumanist) subjectivity, we must also ask after their reversals, obsolescences, and retrievals. This is the case because, though cultural bodies are bodies produced by technological culture, they are also themselves technologies.

The basic principle of Dyens’s thought is, I think, irrefutable. Western cultures derive from a particular physical conception of materiality that is ultimately untenable in light of the scales of reality that have been ushered in with new technologies. In the broadest and most basic sense, our foundational laws are simply unable to account for present realities, a fact that is seen equally in the interminability of debates over file sharing and stem cell research (i.e., the fact that the debates themselves seem to have no end forthcoming) as it is in the persistent deconstruction of everything from gender to disciplinarity. Quite simply, subjectivity—along with the collective and individual norms, laws, rituals, and so on, that connect to it—is deeply entwined with the specificities of media (which are themselves alive, according to Dyens’s formulation), an idea that Mark Poster has dramatized in his discussion of analog subjectivity and print culture.33 Moreover, in the context of numerous arguments similar to Poster’s, it is reasonable to conclude that various forms of “law” are imbricated in one another so that laws of physics (for example) are connected to juridical laws.34 Indeed, the current rash of global crises—economic, environmental, and political—might all be attributed in part to an incommensurability between the (normative) laws that govern us and our reflection of them through our daily practices, and this incommensurability directly relates to the profusion of scales that are now in play.

What Dyens raises, though, is an understanding that places normative laws on the same ontological stratum as the actions that they direct. As a result, actions are not actually governed by normative laws in his view; instead, the laws themselves are understood as particular actions that interact, nonhierarchically, with other activities. In this respect, scientific posthumanism relates multiple realities to one another through points of intersection and fields of overlap rather than (for example) through a shared relation to an (extradiscursive) Real. Correspondingly, conflicts between various strata of reality result not (for Dyens) from an originary lack but from an excess of data that overwhelms attempts to construct linear causality wherever such scales coexist.

Cultural bodies, then, constitute an attempt to realign these disparate strata by articulating them in the dematerialized (or “a-medial”) terms of information. We have already seen how this plays out with respect to the constitution of life, where life is redefined as a continuum of intensity rather than as a category of inclusion–exclusion. Similarly, Dyens describes a perpetual reconstitution of realities that takes place through the shifts in perspective afforded by contemporary technologies.35 As with life, though, these realities do not correlate via the category of reality (or the Real) but rather through the very process of reality construction that yields them. In this respect, life and reality feed back into one another because the perspectives offered by new technologies are defined through the content that they yield in the conventional domains of living beings (i.e., the scales and intensities of reality that they make visible). As a result, explosions of life and reality are always-already implicated in one another, with each participating in the process of the other (i.e., realities themselves participate in a process of living, and vice versa) because they are both understood by Dyens as dematerialized processes (in the sense that they are culturally overdetermined).

This entanglement of reality and life is most evident in Dyens’s discussions of virtual reality. For example, Dyens contradicts media artist Char Davies’s claim that virtual beings have “no otherness” to argue, in contrast, that the mystery of virtual beings is precisely the coevolution of man and machine of which they are the conduit.36 However, though Dyens takes this to mean that a virtual being is “a perception come alive,”37 it is more the case that this is a conflation of life and a particular stratum of reality (i.e., virtual reality). That is, evolution in this formulation does not signify a development in humans or machines but rather the emergence of a perspective that they both might share. As a result, this account bolsters the conception that the boundaries of life and reality are simultaneously breached and reinforced through recourse to the other.

This simultaneity, then, reveals a paradoxical causality at the core of Dyens’s construction of life, a code that operates as its constitutive ambivalence. On one hand, life is an emergent phenomenon of cultural (including genetic) interactions, suggesting that it is an (unpredictable) effect of (not necessarily living) processes. On the other hand, though, life is also “an energy . . . that simply uses the forms and materials that are most useful to it,”38 implying that living beings possess a form of agency that distinguishes them from their materials.39 This paradox is not, in and of itself, particularly notable, but what is notable is that it is not avowed as a paradox by Dyens: in the same moment that the term life explodes a notion of living to multiply the Real into an infinite play of realities, it also congeals the ambivalent causality through which this multiplication takes place. As a result, the migration of evolutionary processes between biological and cultural strata is concealed, and the evolutionary process itself is naturalized. In short, by registering constructions of life and reality on a shared continuum of evolution, the leap from evolution’s biological foundation to Dyens’s cultural logic is sublimated.

From this perspective, we can reinvigorate Dyens’s guiding question of what happens when memes become the dominant term in the memes–genes relation: in the coproliferation of life and realities—a movement that extends life beyond the language of exclusion to include all possible entities—what is changed? As an immediate response, this recalls the informatic reduction of embodiment that is regularly the subject of Hayles’s critique and that is considered in chapter 3 of this volume: we might say that Dyens’s notion of life obsolesces questions of subjective ethics and individual embodiment because human-scale reality is no longer any more important than any other stratum of reality.40 Moreover, if we accept Dyens’s argument that we are now dominated by culture, we are also forced to accept that the values of biological embodiment are no longer primarily determinant.

This forced disappearance of embodied values suggests a host of further obsolescences, situating Dyens as a successor to the recent history of French thinkers about whom Kroker remarks, “In their collective imagination is rehearsed the terminal symptoms of the age of technology triumphant: the death of politics, the death of aesthetics, the death of the self, the death of the social, the death of sex.”41 Quite simply, Dyens’s narration of technology’s cultural materiality performs a (by now familiar) poststructuralist disappearance of universal values. And yet, what nominates Dyens as an author of scientific posthumanism is the fact that he consciously distances himself from this poststructuralist perspective through recourse to the scientific provenance of Darwinian evolution and further argues that one must ultimately choose between what he characterizes as the vagaries of French thought (citing specifically Deleuze) and the more immediately material realities of science.42 In a sense, then, the body is doubly obsolesced in Dyens’s thought: first, the particularities of flesh disappear in the positive language of science that renders them as probability data, exchangeable with cultural replicators; and second, this disappearance itself is disavowed through his insistence on the objective truth of this rendering, which is presented as though it were free from bias and subjective influence. As a result, it is irrelevant that Dyens does not see himself as an advocate of posthumanism in its transhumanist appearance, where technological progress is taken to be an ethical imperative.43 In fact, Dyens’s advocacy runs much deeper because it is spoken in a language of inevitability.

There is a twin movement to Dyens’s thought: on one hand, it moves away from Dawkins’s genetic determinism by extending genes beyond the metrics of biology; on the other hand, this movement away reinscribes precisely the logic that drives genetic determination. In this sense, the language of science—the injunction to measure, repeat, and theoretically falsify—constitutes the reversal potential of both cultural bodies and Darwinian evolution: the unmarked values of science are reinforced precisely in the cultural body’s movement away from conventional conceptions of material reality.

With this in mind, consider Dyens’s argument that there is a natural biological attraction that has been subsequently overtaken by culture. This shift, he argues, occurs because the metric of fertility is changed by the ubiquity of media. In short, “human beauty is pulled from its foundations”44 because our contemporary media environment results in our seeking culturally (rather than biologically) fertile bodies. As a result, a sex-symbol celebrity such as Pamela Anderson was in the 1990s (for example) is no longer precisely human but is instead a “network of signs and desires [whose] ontology is cultural in nature.”45

However, this raises the question of whether human beauty was ever actually primarily biological, as Dyens suggests. That is, has desire ever been simply about reproduction? Theorists as diverse as Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, and Butler (to name only a few) have argued persuasively that this is not the case. In response, Dyens offers the historical consistency of the “ideal waist-to-hip ratio” in “beautiful” women as evidence, but this contention neglects that the term that grounds the argument (i.e., beauty) is itself discursively charged, specifically as that which paradoxically sustains the nature–culture divide that it bridges.46 Beauty thus becomes a slippery metaphor in Dyens’s hands, simultaneously reified through its relation to biology while remaining necessarily abstract in its cultural deployment (because to mean at all, beauty has to mean something beyond simply reproduction).47

In Dawkins’s case, he responds to this line of critique by redoubling his emphasis on complex interactions that take place at the genetic level. That is, implicit in his argument is the idea that cultural values themselves exist only relative to genetic replication, which is to say that values that seemingly interfere with the ability of individuals to reproduce might nonetheless persist because they are useful to the replicative tempi and processes of certain genes. The key, in this perspective, is that genes occupy a privileged position in the gene–behavior relation such that behaviors are symptoms (rather than causes) of genetic processes. In this sense, Dawkins’s theory is profoundly anticonstructivist, but this is not to say that he denies any link between behaviors and genetic processes. Instead, by treating perceptible processes symptomatically, Dawkins simultaneously severs and reinforces the bidirectional interaction between the two strata. That is, behaviors (as symptoms) are relegated to being a means of registering and measuring genetic processes; however, precisely as such, they dictate the ultimate terms through which the latter are understood, specifically delineating the meaning of genetic success. By denying the material consequences of this doubled move, Dawkins is bound to a scientifically objective notion of materiality that ultimately confines his thought to a human scale of perception (though, to be clear, he does not acknowledge this). Notably, this is not because he is limited by human sense organs (which his emphasis on genetics moves beyond) but because his narratives of genetic processes are continually constrained by the necessity to make sense as human interpretations.48 Moreover, they are interpretations that ignore the material differences between strata of reality so that Dawkins’s claim to genetic materiality has the character of alibi: while appearing to be enactors of evolutionary activity, genes in fact function in Dawkins’s narrative to distract attention from the narrative element of evolution itself.

This is the sense in which Dawkins’s seemingly anticonstructivist position does not actually engage with its purported interlocutor. That is, the constructivist position does not consist in denying the existence of material facticity but rather in the assertion that entrance into discourse always-already marks specific facts. As Butler has famously argued with respect to sex, to concede the undeniability of a given fact is always to concede a particular valorization of it so that the discourse through which that concession inevitably occurs is “formative of the very phenomenon that it concedes.”49 To claim that a particular utterance is true, then, is also to perform the reality (or, in Butler’s case, the subject position) whereby that is the case. If a different subject position were performed (which is not always, if ever, a matter of choice), the criteria for truth would also be shifted.

In this context, it is clear that Dawkins’s argument masks the assumptions it is predicated on so that, ironically, we might accuse him of anthropomorphizing: in his insistence on the genetic basis of human behavior, Dawkins veils a much deeper attachment to certain cultural sexual mores, namely an economy in which survival and reproduction are part and parcel of the same intensity.50 This attachment naturalizes both the equation of survival and reproduction and the privilege that he affords them, which in turn insulates his reading of Darwinian evolution from the accusations of tautology discussed earlier. As we saw with reproduction and beauty, survival has to mean something beyond simply persistence, and genetics is not the territory where this meaning is registered (i.e., where it would mean). Indeed, this is a frequent criticism of science that has arisen within that discipline’s reflexive arm: as Hayles has noted, “one of the important insights that has emerged in science studies in the last 20 years is the realization that scientific models are underdetermined with respect to empirical evidence (or, to put it another way, that multiple models may be consistent with prevailing knowledge).”51 In this light, Dawkins’s claims to objective truth based on such empirical evidence are not only paradoxical (as discussed earlier) but also insufficient.

Metal and Flesh is haunted by a similar problem, though it is arrived at from the opposite perspective. Consider, for example, Dyens’s argument that “human beings . . . are nothing more than a specific historical construct.”52 What value is indicated by “nothing more than” in this statement? Is this to suggest that there exists something that is not historically situated? At the very least, the statement suggests that understanding humans as epiphenomena detracts from the value that they would possess if they were not. In this comportment, even if Dyens does not posit the existence of a neutral transcendental universal, he nonetheless reserves a space for a hegemonized one. As a result, we might say that Dyens acts in the manner of a bourgeois individual, in Žižek’s sense: he thinks that the Universal is a property of the Particular but acts in the opposite way.53 In this way, what Dyens misrecognizes is not reality (i.e., the fact that humans are epiphenomenal) but the illusion that structures that reality (i.e., the value he attaches to a notion of “humanity” that is potentially transcendental and universal). The illusion is therefore double: it consists in overlooking the illusion that structures his effective relationship to reality, in this case, the implication of value itself in the very language that speaks against particular values. In short, we might say that subjective meaning—as a performance of value—functions as Dyens’s ideological fantasy.54

Stated succinctly, then, this is to say that it is necessary for both Dawkins and Dyens to posit reproduction and survival as terms that are privileged a priori. Importantly, it is not the particular content that is determinant here but the positing itself. In this light, it is not the coexistence of heritable traits with random alterations that is the essence of their reading of Darwinian evolution; instead, these discoveries simply reinforce the injunction to mean (the necessity of narration) that has been a mainstay of humanity throughout its (necessarily narrated) history. In this respect, the evolutionary assumptions of scientific posthumanism are complicit with the very humanism against which scientific posthumanism was mobilized in the first place.55

Consider, then, that Dyens purports to think the ground zero of the human–technology nexus outside of conventional anthropocentric language. Following McLuhan, Metal and Flesh is predicated on the notion that we perceive reality through a rearview mirror so that our natural and intuitive worldviews are geared toward what has already happened rather than what is taking place in a present moment. As a result, we can only perceive our present realities, and make choices about our future directions, by examining the technologies through which we perceive the world rather than by attempting to directly encounter the world itself. In Dyens’s case, he pursues this task through his insistence on the paradoxical and entangled status of perceptions derived from the multiplicity of technologies that are now active.

However, as has been alluded to, the fundamental influence that technology has on our perceptions today may not reside in the perceptive apparatuses of these technologies themselves but instead in the disavowed value system that is activated through them. As McLuhan always insisted, media do not simply project their purported “content” but also project their medial biases onto this purported content. Thus, to probe the technology of scientific posthumanism, we might ask after what is achieved through the privileging discussed earlier; that is, what specifically is achieved by Dyens’s culture-based construction of “survival”? In its simplest form, the answer to this question is another sense in which Dyens’s posthuman is scientific: in lieu of recognizing human individuals as the source of a relatively limited range of perceptions, Dyens transcends this limit by emphasizing the multiple processes at work in any given perception. Through this emphasis, otherwise incommensurable strata can be compared: memes and genes, for example, but also humans and machines. Dyens’s posthuman is scientific, then, because its economy consists in that which can be registered scientifically: pure scientific reasoning, detached from any specific biology, is the technology of those levels of reality that elude our conventional sensory apparatus but are nonetheless quantifiable. That this quantifiability manifests in Metal and Flesh as that which eludes empiricism does not rob Dyens’s argument of its scientificity but rather pulls it closer to the heart of science itself.56

To understand why this is scientific, consider the obvious question that is never asked in Metal and Flesh: what of the imagination? That is, if contemporary media have rendered culture material and ideas alive, what is the status of the imagination? Do hallucinations occupy the same ontological territory as memes? Is nothing now falsifiable? These questions do not enter into either Dyens’s or Dawkins’s accounts precisely because they cannot possibly register there: in both cases, the imagination can only enter into consideration when its otherness has been sublimated to a process of replication. Emphatically, then, the movement of evolutionary processes into the cultural domain must be—in Dyens’s account—unilateral. As such, the extension of the definition of life to include viruses, ideas, and machines is a misnomer. Instead, it is the nonliving and disembodied language of science that has been extended to what was the realm of the living but is now rendered exclusively as a “badly analyzed composite” of probability data.57

Simply put, cultural bodies are dematerialized bodies. In them, everything conceivable becomes relatable, and everything relatable becomes interchangeable. Energy is disentropized because it is made a matter of exchange, a matter of income and expense in a static economy of replication: nothing living, after all, escapes Dyens’s unary code of survival. In this sense, cultural bodies are a completion of biological science, taking form in and as the moment that biology finally dispenses with the alibi of fleshly corroboration in favor of the quantifiable materiality of the discipline of science. In cultural bodies, evolution is no longer a scientific theory—is no longer a theory that is unified, repeatable, and falsifiable—but instead occupies the position of scientific materiality itself, namely, that through which what exists is registered as such.

Again, though, it must be emphasized that this dehumanizing dematerialization is also a hyperhumanization (although Dyens does not present it as such). The genealogy of science, after all, is profoundly anthropomorphic in that it situates knowledge within a progressivist narrative of accumulation (in the sense that scientific discovery is predicated on the assumption that such discovery moves one closer to an objective truth of the matter at hand).58 There is a sense in which cultural bodies are, after all, human bodies because in them is performed the human’s redefinition of itself, where the obsolesced human individual (obsolesced because the individual is no longer a sensible unit of distinction for Dyens) returns to haunt scientific thought as its grounding metaphor. Thus a correction to the observation that the movement of scientific measurement into life is unilateral (as a probabilistic construction of life suggests): this unilaterality bespeaks a paradoxical twin movement—always evading scientific consciousness—of life into science.

The scientific posthuman is a simulated human, then, but it may be all the more human for this fact. That is, it exists in a logic of simulation, where the thing initially taken to be indicative of an outcome becomes the outcome itself. However, because Dyens aims to escape the language of simulation, his failure to accomplish this is—paradoxically—also his success. That is, Dyens’s failure might be read as a paroxysm of the evolutionary code that rules both his and Dawkins’s thought: his mistake, to put it crudely, is to fail to avow this failure as such and to take refuge instead in a language of causal reason.

Thus Dyens’s cultural bodies cannot ultimately account for the very shifts in perspective of which they are taken to be indicative. In fact, this is seen in the claim in Metal and Flesh that cultural bodies are ultimately bodies made of representations wherein “linearity and causality no longer exist”59 so that “each body is several living ones simultaneously.”60 As mentioned earlier, because demarcations are a matter of perspective, phenomena are distinguished relatively, according to their degree of complexity (rather than absolutely, according to categories of life and death). However, the question remains: where is this complexity viewed from so that it can register as such?61 That is, if complexity exists in measurable degrees and is oriented in a causal topology, doesn’t this metric itself amount to an (hierarchical) abstract category that quantifies qualitatively different phenomena? In this sense, complexity—as a metric—is a transcendental category, and one that always performs more than it claims: again, “greater complexity” means something because it appeals to something beyond its avowed purview so that the deterritorializing movement of complexity is reterritorialized in this appeal.62 As in Dawkins, this suggests that Metal and Flesh glides between expressing life as multiplicity (i.e., life as composed of qualitative differences) and life as multiple (i.e., life as composed of numerous iterations of a single essence) without fully attending to either understanding.

Dyens seems to be intuitively aware of this discrepancy in his suggestion that representations are necessary to existence because they act as time buffers.63 That is, there remains the sense of a locatable, unified force that is active in this theory (in this instance, housed under the concept of time), despite the rhetoric of nonlinearity and a-causal relations. While it is true that this impetus is obnubilated by changes in name—from “time” to “life” to “evolution”—its tautological configuration remains constant throughout. As a result, we might argue that the ultimate reversal potential of the process of dematerialization that yields cultural bodies is the rematerialization of experience that was the project of Deleuze and Guattari. That is, by remaining trapped in the simulating logic of semiotics, the cultural body performs the possibility of “a rhizomatic network of experience where events vanish into a decoded world of immateriality, only to instantly reappear in their opposite sign-form in an endless chain of ‘lines’ of flight and interruption.”64 In Dyens’s failure to address this possibility, it is paradoxically made more proximate as the completion of cultural bodies’ semiotic performance.

With all of the preceding in mind, it seems clear that the territory from which cultural bodies spring is not only the nexus of humans and machines (as claimed) but also (and more fundamentally) a scene of language. In demonstration of this, throughout this chapter, I have intentionally conflated the theories of Dyens and Dawkins, with the latter also liberally mixed with Darwin.65 Through this tactic, I have (performatively) indicated the slipperiness of the metaphors employed by Dyens as well as their resulting tendency to signify multidirectionally at the very moment that they are intended to be most unilateral. In this respect, Dyens cannot adequately answer accusations of “slapdash science” because his construction of the cultural body is ultimately dependent on this slippage.

Indeed, complaints of unscrupulousness are precisely what regularly met Metal and Flesh’s publication, especially in the scientific community. For example, Philip E. Mirowski is perplexed as to how anyone could “so lumpenly reify ‘memes’ to the point that they might convince themselves that something called a ‘cognitive ecology’ could actually displace the biological ecosphere.”66 Furthermore, he accuses Dyens of using “watered-down summaries” in lieu of “real” scientific sources, resulting in numerous theoretical errors that ultimately amount to a book that is a “projection of naturalistic metaphors onto cultural studies.”67

What this criticism fails to recognize, though, is that the metaphors slide both ways and that “just because a particular discourse operates within parameters and conventions that we think of as ‘scientific,’ . . . [this] does not mean that the discourse is not metaphysical.”68 That is, there is a sense in which Dyens—perhaps naively—has simply taken science at its word: if scientific knowledge can truly be measured, verified, and added to an existing body of disciplinary knowledge, then what is to stop that knowledge from being radically decontextualized in the way that Dyens has done? The answer is certainly not disciplinary boundaries, because science—as a whole—alleges to describe material reality (rather than the materiality of its discourse), which is also Dyens’s task. Moreover, even specialist knowledge cannot be convincingly invoked: Dawkins, for example, explicitly states the folly of making a “clear separation between science and its ‘popularization’” because pushing the novelty of language and metaphor can produce a new way of seeing that in its own right makes “an original contribution to science.”69 Moreover, as N. Katherine Hayles succinctly states, “metaphor is not opposed to scientific work but intrinsic to it.”70 In effect, then, Dyens simply accepts the implicit claim that because evolutionary theory has been scientifically verified, it describes a material process that is fundamentally and extradiscursively true and that therefore obtains equally in any discursive setting. If Metal and Flesh is objectionable to the scientific community, then this may be because Dyens accepts that scientific results are data in the true sense, namely, that they describe something that persists through a process of extraction and reinsertion (which is to say, they are quantifiable).

Consider the alternative: if scientific data—and thereby scientific knowledge—were context dependent to the extent that their representation in language was constitutively inadequate—to the extent, that is, that their results could never be rendered as data that could be abstracted from their local circumstance—then by what means would this knowledge be verifiable? Indeed, what would constitute this as knowledge?71 Certainly one can make a claim for moderation (i.e., that data might be abstracted but only to a certain extent), but as long as this claim is delineated in terms of disciplinary boundaries, it is destined to limit any findings to the role of recapitulating (and naturalizing) the logic of previous findings within that discipline. The point is that while principles of scientific reality (and scientific exchange) are undeniable, the science itself—taken overall—cannot be exchanged for anything and is thus unintelligible to that which it does not determine. In the case of evolution, this is the (a-rational) scientific worldview from which it springs.72

Thus the fact that Mirowski—among others—objects so strongly to Dyens’s work might instead suggest an unspoken desire to reject the latter scenario: to claim its constitutive neutrality, the scientific method needs to be able to act as though its discoveries are objectively true, an ideological comportment that is thus built directly into the very claims that it evinces.73 That is, a particular method might be modified or refined to produce data that contradict earlier findings, but the possibility of producing data is the grounding principle of scientific inquiry. This tenet is spurious because it allows any particular instance of method to transcend the specific differences between it and other methods, thereby borrowing an unacknowledged value claim of method itself to lend authority to the particular instance. Simply put, science necessarily assumes that there is a method. Mirowski’s conscious objection to Dyens’s liberal use of scientific metaphors, then, may bespeak a deeper anxiety about the truth value of the referents of the metaphors themselves, an intuition that “science can no longer comprehend itself as a representation of the world as it is, and must therefore retract its claim of instructing others about the world.”74

So Dyens has made scientific errors, yes. However, his argument would have been incoherent had these errors not been made because the errors mark an (unconscious) attempt to reconcile the incommensurability that sustains the metaphysics of the evolutionary science that grounds his argument. In this, Dyens illuminates the gap between Dawkins’s selfish gene theory’s (and, more broadly, science’s) idea of itself and its reality, namely, its partiality with respect to motivation. In so doing, he approaches the “why” of science, asking why it values what it does. It may be true that Dyens’s understanding of science is flawed, but his proposition—as an actual utterance—needs to be deciphered.

Indeed, the ramifications of this deconstruction are not only deleterious to the scientific objectivity that underwrites Darwinian evolution. Instead, the desublimating movement flows back toward Dyens, whose flaunting of scholarly convention sometimes teeters on the edge of simple unscholarliness in its numerous contradictory claims that are left unpacked. In this respect, Metal and Flesh additionally merits study for the position that it occupies with respect to other scholarly research: the text carries the intellectual clout of being included in the Leonardo series published by the MIT Press, and yet it is a short and eclectic study that exhibits little of the scientific weightiness that characterizes that institution.75 Furthermore, although the book certainly stirred controversy when it was released, it is safe to say that it has not led to Dyens’s universal acceptance as a major thinker of the convergence of art, science, and technology (the purported area of the Leonardo series). Might Metal and Flesh, then, be considered a footnote to the broader scientific text of MIT Press? If so, this status would suggest the text as a promising site to begin a deconstruction of the values implicit in the writing of scientific posthumanism: what unmarked privileges, for example, might be mobilized by the very gesture that seeks to uncover the laws that govern replication? Dyens answers this question—performatively—by flipping the scientific narrative of Darwinian evolution to write an evolutionary narrative of science.

In a recent lecture, Dyens illustrated the materiality of cultural bodies by asking a simple question: why would one make clones when one has advertising?76 That is, why be constrained by an outdated notion of biological materiality when all the necessary resources exist to create cultural clones? The implication of this is double: first, we are controlled to a greater extent than we can imagine by our cultural (including biological) situations so that (from a behavioral perspective) the science of cloning is a fait accompli; second, though, this also implies that clones themselves are no longer “elsewhere” and “other” but instead have come to occupy a legitimate place in our existential universe. If the behavioral claims that Dyens makes are true, then—in all probability—contemporary subjectivity is overdetermined.77

However, if this projection of scientific posthumanism suggests that such overdetermination is specific to our present era, the constitutive (often implicit) claims contained in scientific posthumanism signal the reverse: the subjectivity of scientific posthumanism is a mythic one in McLuhan’s sense78 in that it is the static abstraction of representations from the living process of evolution. As such, it can be understood as an “intelligible explanation of great tracts of time and of the experience of many processes, and [can be] used as a means of perpetuating such bias and preferences as [it codifies] in [its] structure.”79 Captured under the sign of a single logic (that of Darwinian evolution), the hyperspeed of fractal subjectivity retrieves the deep time of myth: the celebratory hybridity of scientific posthumanism belies an abiding loyalty to the ideologies that produce it, ideologies that date back (in their present form) to at least the Enlightenment.

Thus scientific posthumanism not only retrieves its avowed content (namely, the primordial soup of genetics, which it plays out in the scene of cultural bodies) but also death in its fullest sense. That is, if we accept Dyens’s argument, then death no longer simply indicates the nonliving (which cultural bodies absorb into a continuum of life) but also suggests a form that persists even after death has been obsolesced: technological culture’s evasion of ontic death renders death an important ontology of our time in that it is retrieved as a total and inevitable (and thus noncontemporary) fate. Simply put, Dyens offers deep-seated nihilism as a foundational myth of (both genetic and memetic) Darwinian evolution—not just the end of the human that he predicts but also an end that he performs.

Indeed, if Dyens narrates a detachment of culture from the previously dominant genetics to reproduce along its own memetic lines, his text itself points to these cultural bodies ultimately detaching from culture in a generalized diffusion of negative replicators: the memes for not being human, for not being embodied, for not being culturally situated, and for not having agency all replicate with astonishing velocity.80 When life is all-inclusive, the negative genes that we all possess are innumerable, so who is to say how they will interact, splice, and replicate, and even what replication would mean in this context? In short, cultural bodies are nihilistic because they are dominated by everything that they are not and are thus overdetermined by the nihilism of their subjection.

In this context, it bears noting (vis-à-vis Baudrillard) that the vitality of life lies in the clear opposition between life and death, whereas death—in the full sense—lies in the lack of distinction between the two. That is, when there ceases to be a substantive difference between life and death, death takes on its full ontological implications—its fate—precisely in the form of life.81 If technoculture—in Dyens’s reading—disavows death, then, this does not mean that it has eliminated it but rather that it has expelled it from its system of values.82 As a result, we may well be approaching Ray Kurzweil’s “singularity,” but his dream of longevity may turn out to be the ultimate dystopia, in the sense that the metric of life will have irrevocably changed.83

In summary, the scientific posthuman is thus a posthuman divested of subjectivity and trapped in a language of scientific value, where it survives autovampirically. To be clear, this is not an argument against the logic of evolution, or even against the logic of cultural bodies: indeed, one of the ironies of contemporary technoculture is that it reveals compelling evidence that the boundaries between humans and nonhumans, including animals, are more porous than we might think.84 Rather than contesting these facts, then, I am simply asking what the facts are, in the sense of what they mean. The answer to this question is not—and cannot be—an empirical observation or definitive categorization; instead, it consists in the insistence that the entrance of these observed facts into discourse is also the moment of their constitution as facts, an amalgamating– amalgamation in which cultural bodies begin to speak the foundational biases of science.