Biomedia (Volume 11)

Electronic Mediations

by Eugene Thacker

As biotechnology defines the new millennium, genetic codes and computer codes increasingly merge-life understood as data, flesh rendered programmable. Where this trend will take us, and what it might mean, is what concerns Eugene Thacker in this timely book, a penetrating look into the intersection of molecular biology and computer science in our day and its likely ramifications for the future.
Integrating approaches from science and media studies, Biomedia is a critical analysis of research fields that explore relationships between biologies and technologies, between genetic and computer "codes." In doing so, the book looks beyond the familiar examples of cloning, genetic engineering, and gene therapy-fields based on the centrality of DNA or genes-to emerging fields in which "life" is often understood as "information." Focusing especially on interactions between genetic and computer codes, or between "life" and "information," Thacker shows how each kind of "body" produced-from biochip to DNA computer-demonstrates how molecular biology and computer science are interwoven to provide unique means of understanding and controlling living matter.

Thacker provides in-depth accounts of theoretical issues implicit in biotechnical artifacts-issues that arise in the fields of bioinformatics, proteomics, systems biology, and biocomputing. Research in biotechnology, Biomedia suggests, flouts our assumptions about the division between biological and technological systems. New ways of thinking about this division are needed if we are to understand the cultural, social, and philosophical dimensions of such research, and this book marks a significant advance in the coming intellectual revolution.

"Biomedia provides an excellent survey of contemporary developments and issues in biotechnology and bioinformatics."-- Catherine Waldby, author of The Visible Human Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Eugene Thacker is an American philosopher, poet and author. He is Professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. His writing is often associated with the philosophy of nihilism and pessimism. Thacker's books include In the Dust of This Planet and Infinite Resignation.

Reviews

[mono]

α - part of U of Minnesota's 📚Electric Mediations

Ω(»,Φ,i,β) - Ew, gross - philosophy... Should've paid closer attention & saw past the buzzword title.

⇝ - 📚Advances in Unconventional Computing, Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, Marshall McLuhan, Arthur Kroker, Donna Haraway

[Aivaras Žukauskas]

Interesting, but needlessly convoluted at points, which diminishes its readability significantly for a non-specialist.

[Alexander O. Smith]

The first 70 pages of this book are fascinating ways to initialize a metaphysics of contemporary data processing within a media theory lens. This book focuses on biological data, however there's no reason this shouldn't apply to other forms of data. It just happens that the most critical point of this book is in asking in a speculative fashion, "What becomes of life conceptually when considered to be extended and interpreted through media?" Easily this could also apply to cultural data. However, if one reads the book through this lens, the empirical investigations occurring after page 70 seem exceptionally technical, and are of lesser interest.

When read next to a lot of more recent critiques of data and media which are not from this STS framework, it is interesting how much those critiques lack nuance relative to work such as this. For example, today often critiques are such that media technologies and data should push against dualities or dichotomies, but then a few steps in their reasoning, they reaffirm them indirectly. Works such as Thacker's show precisely how mechanisms of data processing affirm the constant connection of media and data, but also the distinctions between "translation" and "transformation" occur across these media. He makes it clear that taking the ideological position of "no dichotomy" does not work. One has to materially understand instances of "translation"/"transformation" to really understand how the dichotomy doesn't exist. Many other token ideological gestures to this position abstract media and data to the point that there is no material distinction between the two. One may as well be talking about the data contained in a jpeg relative to the data contained in a spreadsheet as if they are equally without "dichotomy" when they obviously are not. The construction of the "dichotomy" of these distinctions are unique in each case, and without properly looking at them directly, academics unwittingly reaffirm them without realizing they aren't really sure what the data or the media are even in applied cases.

Resisting those reductions, Thacker made clear in as early as 2004, that to speak of "data" in relation to "life" requires a nuanced development of the way in which different media formats translate each other. In this sense the first 70 pages read as refreshingly clear theory.

After the first 70 pages, however, Thacker seems to dive into a stylistic speculative fiction of data structures that requires a particularly niche knowledge set that one cannot read without doing extensive homework in biocomputing technologies that are 20 years old AND read that in context of somewhat obscure short stories about biology and technology. This gave a dimension to the book that does not seem to extend the theory to the masses so much as make it esoteric and authorially stylistic. I'm beginning to realize this is why later so-called "speculative realists/materialists" chose instead to stick to more of the speculative fiction of more popular authors writing about the mystical and the "weird." The sort of esoteric stylistics used by Thacker does not have educational appeal to extend speculative literature into critical literature.

Regardless, it is interesting to see these stylistics prior to what the internet denizens have deemed "speculative realism". Thacker was not considered among the major players in that movement initially, but it is clear that he was thinking along side them the entire time.