wetwares.txt

Wetwares
BY Richard Doyle


Edited by
Sandra Buckley
Michael Hardt
Brian Massumi
. . . U N C O N T A I N E D
B Y
D I S C I P L I N E S ,
I N S U B O R D I N A T E
PRACTICES OF RESISTANCE
...Inventing,
excessively,
in the between...
PROCESSES OF HYBRIDIZATION
24
Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living
Richard Doyle
23
Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed
William E. Connolly
22
Globalizing AIDS
Cindy Patton
21
Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis
Cesare Casarino
20
Means without End: Notes on Politics
Giorgio Agamben
19
The Invention of Modern Science
Isabelle Stengers
18
Methodologies of the Oppressed
Chela Sandoval
17
Proust and Signs: The Complete Text
Gilles Deleuze
16
Deleuze: The Clamor of Being
Alain Badiou
15
Insurgencies: Constituent Power and
the Modern State
Antonio Negri
14
When Pain Strikes
Bill Burns, Cathy Busby, and Kim Sawchuk, Editors
13
Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and
the Pragmatics of the “Outside”
Cary Wolfe
12
The Metamorphoses of the Body
José Gil
11
The New Spinoza
Warren Montag and Ted Stolze, Editors
10
Power and Invention:
Situating Science
Isabelle Stengers
9
Arrow of Chaos:
Romanticism and Postmodernity
Ira Livingston
8
Becoming-Woman
Camilla Griggers
7
A Potential Politics:
Radical Thought in Italy
Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Editors
6
Capital Times:
Tales from the Conquest of Time
Éric Alliez
5
The Year of Passages
Réda Bensmaïa
4
Labor of Dionysus:
A Critique of the State-Form
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
3
Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition,
Media, and Technological Horizons
Eric Michaels
2
The Cinematic Body
Steven Shaviro
1
The Coming Community
Giorgio Agamben

Theory Out of Bounds
Volume 24
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Wetwares
Experiments in Postvital Living
Richard Doyle

For Amy and Jackson

Acknowledgments
i x
C h a p t e r 0 .
Welcome to Wetwares™, N.0
1
C h a p t e r 1 .
Representing Life for a Living
C h a p t e r 2 .
Simflesh, Simbones:
At Play in the Artificial Life Ribotype
C h a p t e r 3 .
Disciplined by the Future:
The Promising Bodies of Cryonics
C h a p t e r 4 .
“Give Me a Body, Then”: Corporeal Time-Images
C h a p t e r 5 .
“Remains to Be Seen”: A Self-Extracting Amalgam
C h a p t e r 6 .
Uploading Anticipation, Becoming Silicon
C h a p t e r 7 .
Dot Coma: The Dead Zone of Media and
the Replication of Family Values
C h a p t e r 8 .
“Take My Bone Marrow, Please”: The Community
in Which We Have Organs in Common
C h a p t e r 9 .
Wetwares; or, Cutting Up a Few Aliens
C h a p t e r 1 0 .
Sympathy for the Alien: Informatic Ecologies and
the Proliferation of Abduction
Notes
Index
Contents

Acknowledgments
even the most schematic transcript of the voices and impulses that have
contributed to the production of this book would take longer to write than the book
itself, so, dear readers, let the impossible compression begin.
Various allies have helped keep the Doyle going and periodically
becoming, including, but not limited to, Celexa, Wellbutrin, Goya Espresso, Spring
Creek Watershed, Rothrock State Forest, and McCoy Natatorium. Thanks go to
the National Security State: its idiotic drug war has vastly improved the genetics and
potency of Cannabis Indica and Sativa and its various hybrids. Good work, fellas!
The infosphere has been almost as productive as these more fa-
miliar allies; this book was begun during the first outbursts of the World Wide Web,
whose exponential growth is the locationless prime mover of this paltry production
and its testimony to the body of an emerging ecstatosphere. Forget the global brain
and give thanks to evolution for getting on beyond cognition . . .
Speaking of forgetting: Sounds have worked on teaching me how
to listen, and some of them have included: DJ Spooky, everybody who has ever turned
a turntable into an instrument of chaotic joy, the recursive sounds of feedback—all
praise Hendrix—the Infernal Chrome Gods and WKPS.
Every one of my students, both undergraduate and graduate, have
hacked UC Berkeley and Penn State into ecologies of learning for all of us: thanks,

and if you learned how to read you will hear yourselves scattered through every page
of this book.
Moolah: This book’s writing and research was aided and abetted
by the Institute for Arts and Humanistic Studies and the Research and Graduate
Studies Office at Penn State University. Thanks for the support.
Academic disciplines: Can’t live with ’em, can’t get paid without
’em. Thanks to the following people for saying yes to disciplinary innovation, often
at great personal cost: Stan Shostak, Louis Kaplan, Susan Oyama, Zssa Baross, Philip
Thurtle, Kathy Woodward, Michael Fortun, Paco Rodriguez, Suzanne Anker, Michelle
Murphy, Stefan Helmreich, Hannah Landaecker, Chris Kelty, Norton Wise, Brian
Rotman, Evelyn Fox Keller, Steve Shaviro, Lynn Margulis, and Elizabeth Wilson.
The Science, Medicine, Technology, and Culture research group at Penn State (Robert
Proctor, Londa Schiebinger, and Susan Squier) has helped turn our IPO into a re-
markable research site. And thanks to all who have kept the ecstatic traditions of
rhetoric from disappearing into a monoculture. Francesca Royster and Jeff Nealon
have done the most to make working in the Penn State English Department joyful.
Jeff Nealon has taught me too much to give him only one mention, so mega dittos.
Mike Begnal has been the best of all possible neighbors and keeps the old school
fires burning. Richard Morrison and Pieter Martin of the University of Minnesota
Press get thanks for transforming my screed into something like a book, and Jennifer
Smith helped me through the darkest hours of revision. Shouts to Theory Out of
Bounds for making it possible to get between such lovely covers.
Thanks in advance to all readers for differentially actualizing
Wetwares. Everybody else knows who they are. Thanks and praise go out to Gaia,
which, like it or not, includes the NASDAQ.

Z E R O

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in . . .
William S. Burroughs
“Ah Pook the Destroyer”
It is no longer time that exists between two instants; it is the event that is a meanwhile
(un entre-temps): the meanwhile is not part of the eternal, but neither is it part of time—
it belongs to becoming. The meanwhile, the event, is always a dead time; it is there
where nothing takes place, an infinite awaiting that is already infinitely past, awaiting and
reserve. This dead time does not come after what happens; it coexists with the instant or
time of the accident.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
What Is Philosophy?
Addicted to the Future
the book was virtually complete. A disturbingly lively sheaf often appeared in his
dreams—as an item of conversation, an agent in the author’s life, a proliferating
growth or graft that pleasured itself, alloaffectively, by gnawing persistently but
Welcome to Wetwares™, N.0

delicately on the torn contours of dream space—and it became impossible to con-
ceive of a daily life immune from its effects. Wetwares had probably become irre-
versible, kneading and needing the future. “Life may not advance, but it expands.”1
The author, nonetheless, was not always so sure. There was al-
ways some story. Perhaps another chapter needed to be written, many sentences
deleted. Much simultaneously must be given and abstracted, concepts abducted, de-
ducted, and explained. The author had a sense that he had committed minor, absurd
crimes, so he’d better get his story straight. Something repeatable, so that, under in-
terrogation, it would spawn a monstrous labyrinth of questionable details.
It wasn’t a matter of telling the story the same each time; far
from it. Instead, the author sought to cultivate in his interrogators a massive response-
ability, a response for this and a response for that. Even, especially, when he said
nothing. In a work of fiction, he had encountered certain fabulously hot baths in
Japan, where the least of movements would lead to a terrible and variable scalding.
In such situations, hope resides in a continual response, allowing the future to arrive,
dwelling multiply in the present through an almost molecular attention to the sur-
roundings—Freeze! In such cases, knowledge is of course crucial, but so too is an
aptitude for panic.
A Familiar Tale, or “Bodies That Splatter”
You wake up, for example, full of terrible and immediate cold. In a bath tub full of
ice, in fact. You feel the wafting of a breeze in your gut, a raw open wound displacing
an abdomen. Your mouth reeks slightly of tequila, a sensation of taste quickly over-
taken by the agony of postsurgical trauma. You are in shock.
You scream for a while, of course. One needs a war cry, a slogan for
such situations, a refrain prepared in advance for the job. Begin with onomatopoeia,
as most howls become in their insistent tendency toward language. You might want
to choose a scream for this purpose. You might even try “Yahoo!”
But a scream is, of course, a tremendous effort, so either calm
down and cut to the chase or wait for exhaustion and vocal agony to set in. I recom-
mend the former, but the latter is probably more fun to talk about later.
You look to your left and spot a postcard. Nobody bought it in a
boutique. It’s not even one of those free postcards functioning as a new form of dis-
tributed advertising, although it is an advertisement. It has visuals for easy refer-
ence—a crowd of twenty or thirty doctors in clean white lab coats and tiny red cursive
names inscribed on their left pockets beam into the camera, all hoping for an im-
provement on their high school pictures.

W e l c o m e t o W e t w a r e s ™ , N . 0
Cut to an overhead shot. Zoom to a grainy close-up. “GREET-
INGS FROM YOUR HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS” floats above the collected whorls of
hair and skin in cursive Helvetica. You had better call them, the card improbably
seems to suggest. An 800 number graces the back of the card.
You drag your shocked, swooning body to the phone. Where is
the goddamn phone, not to mention your kidney? Fingers stab at buttons and the
ringing begins until you recall your specially prepared refrain, a mantra offered here
for the low purchase price featured on the book’s cover. It’s free if you are reading
Xeroxes, stolen copies, or are just sitting in a megastore and executing the words
right off the page.
“This is a hoax. This is a rumor. This is a rumor of a hoax.”
A Familiar Tale, Part Two: Contact!
The book featured various bits of language that did much of the work in the story
and allegedly were not confined to it. These were rhetorical softwares, unpredictable
algorithms of textual hazard whose results were subject to change. They were part of
the variable character of the book, its consistency of variation. Version N.0, he liked
to call it, if only to register it with the proper authorities. Only the importance of
nothing kept him from iterating the variable to N.N.
Each of the chapters—he could hardly avoid thinking of them as
segments—featured a way of distributing bodies. Oh, there have been lots of ways
to organize bodies—sick bodies, laboring bodies, criminal bodies, pleasured bodies,
meditated bodies, medicated and buried bodies—but these were bodies whose mor-
phology was uncertain and whose habitat was information. Sometimes, as with arti-
ficial life, there was a tendency to act as though there was nothing but information,
but the book tried to map the ecology of these computer organisms and learned that
their cultivation required more than software or hardware. He found these alife
creatures to be quite seductive. Indeed, he sometimes thought that if biotechnology
featured the production of organisms and enzymes most persuasive to the stock
market, artificial life (alife) was an ecology in which the most seductive representa-
tions of life were cultivated with computers and robotics.2
Seductive to whom? Nietzsche raises his hand politely, all his so-
briety helping to govern the arrival of delirious laughter: “Which one? Who gets off
on machines?” Others had already done a remarkable job in detailing the communities
of humans most transfixed by the production of creatures in silico. The demographic
was white and yet psychedelic.3 But even machinic seduction is itself a kind of posses-
sion, an overtaking that signals less the manipulative power of a self than its capacity
2 , 3

for affective transformation. And seduction was hardly an agency—neither active
nor passive, seduction involves a summoning of alterity, the cultivation of a familiar.
“Relax,” this algorithm of the familiar reads, “it’s just a machine.”
A Familiar Tale, Part Three:
Eighteenth-Century Hair, Pink Satin, and Nothing but Boots
What was a machine, again? Deleuze and Guattari insist that machines are fundamen-
tally made of connection, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. A gun connects
flesh and metal at a distance, networks of computers stitch together communities of
chat and rumor. Even a refrain, a bundle of repetitions, is a machine. And yet these
connections are also, paradoxically, cuts or slices:
A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupures). . . .
Every machine, in the first place, is related to a continual material flow. . .
that it cuts into. It functions like a ham-slicing machine, removing portions
from the associative flow: the anus and the flow of shit it cuts off, . . . the
mouth that cuts off not only the flow of milk but also the flow of air and
sound.4
The paradox of this formulation becomes less a logical problem than a machinic one
as soon as we inquire into the conditions necessary to connection. Consider a Turing
machine. The infinite tape (its “continual material flow”) of such a machine is com-
posed of binary marks such as “1” or “0.” Computation emerges from the movement
from state to state and the effects of such movements—one or zero, for example—
on the computational head. Such a movement can be thought of as a connection or
“string” of one state—one line of code—with another, but it is a linkage that proceeds
from interruption—the end of one state and the emergence of another. The head of
the Turing machine thus “cuts into” the flow of the infinite tape even as it connects
binary marks to each other in its internal memory. These interruptions can undergo
sudden changes in kind: this is less a problem of halting than of stammering. Thought
of as the physical systems that they are, such machines are subject to periodic cata-
strophes or “criticality,” a phenomenon I will no doubt return to later.
If machines are composed of cuts that connect—“Connecticut,
Connect-I- cut!”5—it is sometimes useful to carve a distinction between two ecologies
of machines: weapons and tools. A tool “prepares a matter from a distance, in order
to bring it to a state of equilibrium or to appropriate it for a form of interiority.”6

W e l c o m e t o W e t w a r e s ™ , N . 0
Tools are thus tendrils of repetition, bringing matter back to the self or its external
doublet of order. No doubt these deployments wander an itinerary—each blow of the
ax sculpts its edge otherwise, contingently7—but the ecosystem of the tool is orga-
nized “in” autopoiesis—the maintenance of a self by a self, what biologists Humberto
Maturana and Francisco Varela characterize as the emergence of the inside and out-
side, a refrain that creates a territory.8 Weapons, by contrast, incite not territory but
deterritorialization: a horse, rather than being eaten, treated as energy for an interior-
ity, becomes a vehicle, a way of linking one space to another, a shifting range or ter-
ritory whose border is formed by speed. Perhaps the most compressed articulation
of this machinic difference in kind reads: The tool summons repetition, weapons
transformation. For certainly the tool also emerges out of an ecology—including
the rhetorical practices through which a tool is bundled, the ways in which its capac-
ities are rendered repeatable and available for feedback, such as documentation—
but weapons, as this use of the plural suggests, come in packs—they differ even from
themselves.
Stuart Kauffman’s analytic typology of networks is also helpful
in thinking about this differentiation of weapons and tools as respectively deterritori-
alizing and reterritorializing. Kauffman has studied a class of “NK” networks, where
N refers to the number of components in the system and K describes the connectiv-
ity of the network—the number of elements that are cross-coupled in the system.
Kauffman seeks to model the levels of fitness that emerge from different ratios of N
and K, and he argues that it is at the “edge of chaos” that highest fitness levels are
clustered. Here the NK networks suggest that ecosystems with “too much” connec-
tivity—whose limit is a “rugged” landscape, where each element is connected with
each other and mutations are completely communicable—have low adaptive fitness.
They also suggest that networks with low connectivity—where the number of con-
nections is too meager—tend to be trapped in a static fitness location, unable to re-
spond to even beneficial contagions in the network.
Based on this reality, it is eminently plausible that Boolean networks in the
ordered regime but near the boundary of chaos may harbor both the capacity
to perform the most complex tasks and the capacity to evolve most ade-
quately in a changing world.9
In this context, the weapons/tool distinction describes different styles of networks
whose capacities for transformation differ in kind—they are qualitatively as well as
quantitatively different. Indeed, in some sense they “harbor” more and less capacity
4 , 5

for difference. Weapons, as agents of deterritorialization, introduce novel surfaces of
contagion, opening up the system to new forms of connection as K goes through the
roof. Tools, as components of territorialization, tend to insulate ecosystems from
other habits and habitats, as K (connectivity) stays low enough to thwart most conta-
gions at a distance, sheltering equilibrium.
Crucial to this differentiation is the character of the border be-
tween a weapon and other nodes in the network. As connectivity increases, the in-
terface between a weapon and its assemblage becomes indiscernible—not eroded,
imploded, or occluded, but in a state of such entanglement that any attempt to draw
a distinction between weapon and network itself becomes a complex algorithm, an
algorithm whose shortest description is probably itself.
William Burroughs’s Place of the Dead Roads features Kim Carsons,
shootist in training and pen name for Burroughs’s frequent alter ego, William Seward
Hall. For Carsons, the encounter with weapons entails less an acquisition of expertise
than an itinerary of disaggregation. Carsons learns less to use the gun than to graft
it—the condition of being a shootist is to become-gun. This is not a vague, violent
imperative to “be” an object—it is difficult to avoid thinking here of Chevy Chase’s
Caddyshack command to “be” the golf ball—but instead involves a hospitality to an
inhuman form, an integration of an alien entity into one’s very habitat. Such an inte-
gration relies intensely on forgetting; one must be capable of responding to the new
action of a body whose very eye is a node in a network of weaponry, a capacity
linked to a forgetting or an undoing of the old arcs of eye, hand, and memory.
Think of the muzzle as a steel eye feeling for your opponent’s vitals with a
searching movement. Move forward in time and see the bullet hitting the
target as an accomplished fact. . . . I am learning to dissociate gun, arm and eye,
letting them do it on their own, so draw aim and fire will become a reflex. I
must learn to dissociate one hand from the other and turn myself into
Siamese twins.10
To link to the assemblage of gun one must untie the knots between visuality, tactility,
and temporality. Carsons experiences the muzzle as an orifice, a flowing, feeling de-
territorialization of an eye that can now act at a tremendous distance, an action
whose limit is contact with the future—an accomplished fact. This orifice composes a
space of both activity and passivity, a locale of seduction rather than decision. BANG.
The gun even periodically surprises him.
This connection to the weapon cannot exactly be forged on pur-
pose. That would be a little bit like laughing on command—out of alignment, mis-

W e l c o m e t o W e t w a r e s ™ , N . 0
placed, mistimed. As with laughter, it was more a question of being capable of re-
sponse, an undoing of one knot that makes another. Subjectivity, in stitches.
I must learn to dissociate one hand from the other and turn myself into
Siamese twins. I see myself sitting naked on a pink satin stool. On the left
side my hairdo is 18th century, tied back in a bun at the nape of the neck . . .
On the right side, wearing nothing but boots, I cover a nigger killing sheriff
with my 44 Russian. This split gives me a tingly wet dream feeling like the
packing dream, where I keep finding more things to go into my suitcases
which are already overflowing and the boat is whistling in the harbor and
another drawer all full of the things I need . . . 11
To forge an alliance with a weapon, then, is not to treat it as a homuncular double of
the self. Nor does this acquisition of a technological familiar operate through the
simple addition of knowledge; a profound forgetting—whose hand is this, anyway?—
lets “them do it on their own.” The intensity of this amnesis is thus not negative—
new knots and other “dos” are formed out of the undoings of the I. “Your hand and
your eyes know a lot more about shootin’ than you do. Just learn to stand out of the
way.12 Deleuze and Guattari summon this refrain in their discussion of the war ma-
chine. “Learning to undo things, and to undo oneself, is proper to the war machine:
the ‘not-doing’ of the warrior, the undoing of the subject.”13 This undoing proceeds
through the ecstatic labor of conjunction and interruption—Carsons is cleft not by
the impossibility of signification, but by the folds of an origami of subjectivity. A prac-
tice of folding—“on the left side . . . on the right side”—the capacity to split entails less
alienation than “dissociation,” a disciplined differentiation whose transformations are
marked both by ellipses and conjunction, addition and hiatus: “and the boat is whistling
in the harbor and another drawer all full of the things I need . . . and another drawer
all full of the things I need . . . and another drawer all full of the things I need . . . . . .”
A subject in flight—“and the boat is whistling in the harbor”—
Carson is a fugitive from identity itself as he breaks out into a multiplex of personae
divided spatially and temporally from themselves. Conjunction and ellipsis become,
in Burroughs’s hands, machines for connection, an entanglement with another, even
if that other be silence . . . “Silence takes on the quality of a dimension here . . .”14
Entangled with the future, the ballistic collision of flesh and metal becomes an accom-
plished fact when the future itself is a familiar.
Familiars—a zone of interactivity between humans and animals,
“psychic companions” that blur the contours of human subjectivity—supplement Bur-
roughs’s analysis of weapons and their ecologies. Burroughs treats such a conjunction
6 , 7

as an inhuman hospitality.15 Joe the Dead, Carsons’s eventual assassin, has the strength
to be affected by animals, the capacity to respond to a cutaneous blur of species:
Cats see him as a friend. They rub against him purring. He can tame weasels,
skunks and raccoons. He knows the lost art of turning animals into a familiar.
The touch must be very brave and very gentle.16
Cultivating a familiar requires a certain touch. A friendship of
great rigor, it offers not fusion but transduction, as familiar and friend acquire a
common surface, each attempting to burrow into the other. “They rub against him
purring.” Through repetition—stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke—skin and fur become
a multiplicity—neither human nor animal, but an ecstatic smearing of both. The in-
side and outside of each body acts less as a border as it becomes a zone of intensities.
“More” and “less” characterize multiplicities whose accumulations and distributions
can periodically cross catastrophic thresholds—the collapse of a sand dune, a spiking
stock market, the irruption that traverses a synapse, a phase transition. The future?17
As a refrain—“draw aim and fire will become a reflex”—the arm/
eye/gun complex shrugs off its relations to distance, perspective, and light and be-
comes a machinic feeler, trolling for interiority, “a steel eye feeling for your opponent’s
vitals.” Treating the very organs of his opponent as a tactile surface that eludes its char-
acter as an “inside,” Carsons enables a very specific contact with the future—death.
Making contact with the future becomes less a metaphor than a rigorous, proleptic
hospitality, a welcoming of a technological ensemble—gun, arm, eye. This techno-
ecology is forged out of cuts, a severing of connections that erases old networks of
reflex and solicits new architectures of flesh, metal, and time. This undoing is learned,
at least in part, through a welcoming of even technological familiars that smears the
contours of human subjectivity into a zone of connection. As with Kauffman’s NK
networks, increases in connectivity foster new clusters far from equilibrium, novel
connections that emerge out of the new indiscernibility of inside and outside and the
subsequent capacity for contact.
This solicitation operates as a tactile search (and destroy) engine
for interiority and is announced in joy, that “tingly wet dream feeling” whose causal
agency is the split itself: “This split gives me a tingly wet dream feeling like the packing
dream” (emphasis mine). Transformed not by an entity but by that which resides be-
tween entities, a split, a hole, Carsons’s training maps out the contours of a familiar
alliance. Less the effect of an agency than a growth that proliferates between the re-
frain of agencies, Carsons’s splitting emerges as an algo-rhythm of one identity prac-
tice and another, eighteenth-century hair, pink satin, and nothing but boots.

W e l c o m e t o W e t w a r e s ™ , N . 0
Panic Jam
By undoing the here and now, it opens the way to new spaces, other velocities. . . .
Questions, problems, and hypotheses bore holes in the here and now to end up in the
virtual world on the other side of the mirror, somewhere between time and eternity.
Pierre Lévy, Becoming Virtual:
Reality in the Digital Age
Alife creatures, too, were particular sorts of familiars, silicon grafts, a machinic
becoming-animal. Lycanthropy for networks! They were sometimes allopoietic,
ports or links to something other than either the maintenance of a self or its disso-
lution. They were links to panic, the order word for his discussion of alife. Around
alife, people begin to talk and get carried away. More than simple computer models
or simulacra of that old concept, life, alife seems to be an interface that produces the
incessant questions: How is something alive? When will I know? Artificial life disturbs,
continually rendering the border between life and nonlife, flesh and machine, seduc-
tively uncertain. The very border of the flickering alife creature—the morphology
of its phenotype—is in constant question, in stitches. On one side, the creation of
organisms iterable enough to move from computer to computer, capable of being
copied across networks, undoes the monopoly of carbon on living systems and ex-
tends the franchise of vitality to an already uncannily mobile machinic phylum. On
the other tentacle, it deterritorializes life itself, as life becomes an explicit virtuality,
placeless and yet distributed, ubiquitous. It becomes possible that everything is alive—
panic. Nowhere in particular, indiscernible, life outsources the labor of representa-
tion to the newly excited surfaces of computer screens, techno-familiars who are
poster creatures for vitality.
“Panic is creation.”18 If panic qualifies as at least one actant in a
creative ecology, its efficacy resides in a facility for rendering borders and screens
indiscernible. In a panic, the surfaces of the social become slippery—a capacity for
movement arrives as a variable fluidity is discovered in the very sturdiness of things.
A plunging stock, a stampeding crowd, a spitting, cascading flood of lava all index
the sudden arrival of locationless, distributed movement. Panic does not entail a
fundamental loss of control, but instead occasions the emergence of a new, incom-
mensurable order. There is a logic, or at least a rhetoric of the stampede, the pack,
the swarm—a qualitative difference emerges as a docile crowd becomes a mob incited
by rumor. An orgy breaks out in multiplicity, “to lose themselves in the alterity of
the collective.”19
8 , 9

Paradoxically, such changes in kind are often heralded by a sudden
blockage—a computer crashes, a pond freezes, a creek pools up against a downed
limb, an elevator is stuck between floors. Such blockages form new contours for repe-
tition—lap, lap, lap—and, in their very restraint, forge novel zones of excitation,
whirlpools, eddies, turbulence of air and prices. Sociologist Michel Maffesoli describes
the flows of a generalized orgiasm in terms of a refraining, the iterative constraint of
a “bridle”: “The same thing holds for spending as holds for violence: bridling it in
its expression is in fact encouraging its perverse and exacerbated irruption.”20
And yet, to paraphrase Nietzsche, the limb does not refute the
creek. Rather, this repetitive “bridling” is the very substrate of emergence or “irrup-
tion.” Researchers such as Cairns Smith and Stuart Kauffman write of a constitutive
clumping that occasions the arrival of order at the edge of chaos and enables phase
transitions of all kinds.21 “Refrain”—etymologically, both repetitious ditty and bri-
dle—itself clumps or clusters together divergent, qualitatively distinct rhetorical
characteristics—the capacity to be repeated and the capacity for interruption. Writers
such as Judith Butler have noted the productive effects of iteration in the constitution
of gender and identity but have been perhaps less attentive to the creative emergence
of inhuman, nonlinear transformations through such repetition—rumors, sand dunes,
traffic jams, new capacities for subjection installed less by lack than by novelty. As
the substrate of both habit and habitat, though, refrains compose a crucial and pro-
ductive component in the “exacerbated irruption,” not a reaction against it. Instead,
such repetitious blocks form novel and robust flows in ecologies of catastrophe,
what Maffesoli links to Goethe’s notion of “mobile order. . . it is always by blocks, by
ensembles, that things and people are moved.”22 In short, the bumper sticker for
such an inhuman politics reads: Provoke swarms, forget coalitions.
What sorts of events and organisms do such novel flows select
for? Put another way, what sorts of ecologies cultivate such contingencies and com-
munities? As an engagement with multiplicity—one is “beside oneself”—encoun-
ters with panic, rather than reactions against it, are fostered by a counterintuitive
ethos of subtraction. Deleuze and Guattari write of the need to subtract the One
from the unknown or n.
The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but
rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of di-
mensions one already has available—always n – 1 (the only way the one be-
longs to the multiple: always subtracted).23

W e l c o m e t o W e t w a r e s ™ , N . 0
This subtraction operates by amplifying and extracting the capacities of the anom-
alous to be deterritorialized, the line of flight. The cutting of a diamond, for exam-
ple, must follow the singular character (shape, lines of cleavage, flaws, color) of the
stone and determine its heterogeneity to effect the most ecstatic dispersal of light, a
dispersal whose intense dislocation—where is a flicker?—nonetheless localizes value
most effectively. It is by dint of this “value” that a vector distributing diamonds
emerges, a deterritorialization whose attraction operates on the arms and lungs of
the miner and the glittering skin of a starlet. This attraction is itself cultivated through
a subtraction or a “flattening”: “the diamond must have flat surfaces called facets to
act as prisms before it can release its brilliance and dispersion.”24 A cartel to block
sales of an incredibly common stone doesn’t hurt matters, either.
This cultivation of the anomalous, ”itineration,” emerges from
repetition, a doubling. Facets cut and echo each other, not as “reflective” surfaces—
what do they echo but each other, light itself?—but as the iteration of light on light.
Composed of repetition—grind, grind, grind—the very cutting and polishing of a
diamond demands a strict “following” of the particular qualities of each stone. As
with gem cutting, Deleuze and Guattari argue that primitive metallurgy is necessarily
an “ambulant science,” essentially itinerant in its practice.
One is obliged to follow when one is in search of the singularities of a matter,
or rather of a material, and not out to discover a form . . . when one ceases to
contemplate the course of a laminar flow in a determinate direction, to be
carried away by a vortical flow.25
Cleaning a stone or a dish, even reading about it—scrub, scrub, scrub—demands
such an itineration: You missed a spot! This itinerant repetition dislocates or dis-
tributes identity through its proximity to an indiscernible doubling. Panic: Where
was I?
And “to be carried away” by such a flow, one must often instigate
a blockage.26 If the multiple must be “made,” it is because its unfolding demands a
refrain. Through continual repetition, for example, Carsons “dissociates” and learns
to “stand out of the way” of gun, hands, and eyes. The univocal identity called “self”
gets blocked, refrained, flattened, and this blockage emerges precisely through an
attention to something else, the acquisition of a familiar. Deleuze and Guattari sug-
gest that itineration or “an exploration by legwork” jams point of view and blocks
the self’s function as a reference or reproduction:

Reproducing implies the permanence of a fixed point of view that is external
to what is reproduced: watching the flow from the bank. But following is
something different in kind from the ideal of reproduction.27
The discipline of itineration entails an ecstatic but disciplined
receptivity to the turbulent outside where “the self is diluted into a more viscous and
confusional entity.”28 They rub against him purring. This dilution, though, is a ques-
tion of intensity—a difference in kind—rather than loss. Following involves a drift-
ing, entangled complicity “in an objective zone of fluctuation that is co-extensive
with reality itself.”29 Neither suffering nor enjoying a static “point” of view, the
itinerant continually acquires novel capacities to flow, the strange capacity for inva-
sion that biologist Lynn Margulis links to the emergence of endosymbiosis and
Deleuze and Guattari refer to as thought. These capacities for difference often emerge
precisely out of a blockage of an autopoietic self—a self made out of the difference
between inside and outside—and the consequent emergence of a tangle or a “grapple”
(“A thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior
form, operating by relays instead of forming an image”).30 This grapple, as in the
case of Carson, need not simply involve “biological” entities—familiars could be
technological, even textual. “Kim could feel the phantom touch of the lens on his
body.”31 What had been distant—flesh, lens, gaze—acquires a common surface, not
a static bonding but an undulating, variable flow, “light as a breath of wind.”32 The
familiar involves, therefore, an action at a distance, but it is an action whose effects
transpire in no given location—neither eye, lens, nor body—but as a virtual, “phan-
tom touch” or a throbbing “medium”:
Held in a film medium, like soft glass, they are both motionless except for
the throbbing of tumescent flesh . . . “Hold it!” . . . CLICK . . . For six seconds
the sun seems to stand still in the sky.33
An act of distribution, the acquisition of a familiar proceeds only
when identity resides in no specific place or time whatsoever. Computer scientist
Pierre Lévy characterizes this “neither here nor there” quality as a fundamental at-
tribute of the virtual, an ecology where, like many practitioners of the new sports of
the between, entities are nowhere in particular: “the surfer or parachutist is never
entirely there.”34 Less a point of view than a rhythmic, ecstatic capacity for difference,
humans enter into relations with familiars and access newly contacted surfaces: holes
sprout in what had been experienced as wholes.

W e l c o m e t o W e t w a r e s ™ , N . 0
Just You Watch!
Psychologist James Hillman, in his singular treatment of panic, notes that even the
itinerative act of observation can open up such holes, as the rigorous pursuit of atten-
tion creates vertiginous whirlpools of affect that suck the observer into the suspen-
sion of infinite regress:
Pan appears again and again as an observer. There he stands, or sits or leans or
crouches, amidst events in which he does not participate but where he is in-
stead a subjective factor of vital intention. Wernicke says he serves to awaken
the interest of the onlooker, as if when we look at a painting with Pan in its
background, we are the observing Pan. . . . Within the physical intensity of
Pan there is a physical attentiveness, a goat’s consciousness.35
Pan, appearing as an observer, “awakens” the viewer with a start.
Suddenly, we are more than lookers—our observations are doubled, mimed by a
human/animal hybrid who does nothing but make disturbingly visible the mecha-
nisms of the very outside of paint. Pan, in his visibility, renders indiscernible the inte-
rior and the exterior of the painting. The viewer is awakened into the operation of
flesh and all its sensitivities—“attentiveness”—which instantiates the work of art.
The fundamental complicity of observer and observed is experienced as a vertiginous
dissolution of the ready-made differentiation between the interior and exterior of
the painting, the interiority and exteriority of a body. Gilles Deleuze finds this pro-
duction of indiscernibility to be a particular feature of Francis Bacon’s extraordinary
canvases of meat:
What Bacon’s painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility, of undecide-
ability between man and animal. . . . Bacon pushes this to the point where
even his most isolated figure is already a coupled figure, man is coupled with
his animal in a latent bullfight. This objective zone of indiscernibility is the
entire body, but the body insofar as it is flesh or meat.36
Coupling with Pan in the very act of observation, observers find themselves awash
not in reflexivity—I am watching a watcher watch me while watching—but an “in-
finite” refrain whose necessary finitude immerses one in an abyss of indiscernibility,
the catastrophe of flesh—I am watching a watcher watch me watching it watch, I
have lost count, where was I? We have become the observing Pan.37 Less a failure of ob-
servation than the production of and capacity for indiscernibility—becoming-Pan—
the appearance of Pan and the apprehension of meat both provoke strange Möbius

topologies of observation and identity, a panicked experience of ecstasis in which
one is both inside, outside, and neither. Deleuze writes of the disturbing proximity
of meat’s tremendous difference, its testimony to suffering: “The immense pity that
the meat entails.”38 This encounter with interiority’s fundamentally folded charac-
ter—what seemed to be one, autonomous space now becomes a fractalled, crinkly
“zone” of variation where inside and outside, proximate and distant, open a multi-
plex—cultivates affects of often pitiful contagion and complicity with an allegedly
inhuman environment. Deleuze argues that, in the case of Bacon, this “coupling”
provokes an ethos where the very borders between humans and animals—that zone
of the familiar—become indiscernible: “Meat is the common zone of man and the
beast, their zone of indiscernibility.”39
Hence the “goat consciousness” alluded to by Hillman above—
that surefooted, itinerative following of the tangled pathways of becoming, paths
that are in some sense available only in their traversal or their often panicky “running.”
Such an itineration demands a “hole” in the usual operations of selfhood—the outside
must be attended to with immense precision—this rock, that root, that paint must
be responded to with foot, hand, eye, thought rather than consciousness. One less
creates a line or a path than, in the hallucinogenic words of Henri Michaux, “becomes
a line” in a sudden event of exteriority’s indiscernible shrinkage or flattening of the
self into a line.
Becoming a line was catastrophic, but it was, still more unexpectedly (if that’s
possible), prodigious. All of my self had to pass through that line. And through
its horrible joltings. . . . Metaphysics overtaken by mechanics. Forced through
the same path, my self, my thought, and the vibration. Self a thought only,
not thought becoming my self or developing in my self, but myself shrunk
into it.40
Catastrophe and prodigy both resound with a sudden incursion
by the future. Prodigy is the very sign of futurity, a mark that is the trace of the to-
come, “if that’s possible,” while catastrophe recalls the fundamentally rhetorical fab-
ric of the surprise of sudden arrival, what the OED renders as “the change or revo-
lution that produces the conclusion or final event of a dramatic piece.” More than
space is smeared in this zone of indiscernibility between sign and future—the clean
border between present and future becomes slashed, leaking into the sudden jolting
of qualitative difference in that zone of variation present/future, becoming.
Michaux’s prodigious and yet miserably vertiginous becoming—
a flatness of line that yields neither inside nor outside, neither present nor future—

W e l c o m e t o W e t w a r e s ™ , N . 0
extends to the precise and thoroughly malleable actions of sensation, a work of re-
markable physical complexity detailed by Paul Virilio in his discussion of Rodin. “In
order to sense an object with maximum clarity, one must accomplish an enormous
number of tiny, rapid movements from one part of the object to another.”41 This ac-
complishment, though, involves a distributed agency—neither here nor there but an
itinerant, diffuse sensitivity that enables objects to traverse the senses. The event of
observation is less a passive reception than an incessant exposure to a swarm, a hospi-
tality to the multiple “parts” of an object. This hospitality demands both continual
openings and closings, the blockages, flattenings, and exposed surfaces of a refrain.
Michaux, this time in alliance with mescaline:
As if there were an opening, an opening like a gathering together, like a world,
where something can happen, many things can happen, where there’s a whole
lot, there’s a swarm of possibilities.42 (emphasis mine)
Neither passive nor active, this facility for observation proceeds through a “hosting”
of sensation. Overtaken, the self is riven by fractures of connectivity, alliances with
alterity that gather, cluster, and flock even as identity’s surface is punctured with
connections to the outside, an opening that is not an absence. Such alliances can often
block “blockage”—the rigid distinction between inside and outside, present and fu-
ture—and enable a swarm, an organized and distributed multiplicity.43
Hence itinerant observation—a blockage of the self and an open-
ing onto a swarm of possibilities, “following”—provokes capacities for futures, fu-
tures that defy prediction in their “fundamental alienness.”44 Stuart Kauffman en-
counters this alien character of futurity in his discussion of algorithmic complexity, a
principle of computer science that renders humans into slack-jawed observers of
the future, contingency addicts for whom any transformation of the present can be
encountered but not compressed.
For vast classes of algorithms, no compact, lawlike description of their behav-
ior can be obtained. . . . If the origin and evolution of life is like an incom-
pressible computer algorithm, then, in principle, we can have no compact
theory that predicts the details of the unfolding. We must instead simply
stand back and watch the pageant . . . If we demand to know its details, we
must watch in awed wonder and count and recount the myriad rivulets of
branching life and the multitudes of its molecular and morphological details.45
Kauffman refers here to phenomena that physicist Stephen Wolfram, among others,
dubs “irreducible,” algorithms that are likely to be the shortest possible description

of themselves. Such algorithms or recipes require a very specific ingredient: futures.
Outside of the actual instantiation of its code, the running of the program, observers
can have no detailed foreknowledge of the system. “We must simply stand back and
watch the pageant.” Hence the actual computation—even counting—of complex al-
gorithms demands, at the very least, software, hardware, and futurity. Such algo-
rithms qualify as what Deleuze and Guattari characterized above as “an exploration
by legwork” or itineration—there is no cutting to the chase. “They do not meet the
visual condition of being observable from a point in space external to them.”46
Such an entangled observation is thus more than passive; it in-
volves a profound stoppage, a capacity to endure the meantimes through which the
details of the future emerge. In Kauffman’s example, we must even endure “awed
wonder,” the sublime incapacitation of self by the agonizingly gorgeous unfolding of
complexity. But such endurance is more general than this instance of the sublime—
Kauffman too, as just such a complex algorithm, can only, actively, wait. This active
waiting is an exposure or a hospitality to the future: difference is hosted by a self that
lives not simply off identity but through the sensitivity to and capacity for variation,
allopoiesis. In Kauffman’s example above, we must at the very least be capable of
registering countable differences—we must be available for the sudden flow of sur-
prise, “myriad rivulets of branching life and the multitudes of its molecular and
morphological details.” More than the arrival of information, surprise shocks with
asignification, tearing configurations of meaning and fostering the emergence of
new forms of subjectivity, “these ruptures of meaning that are auto-foundational of
existence.”47 What happened?
Seduced by Science/Fiction
These ruptures, too, are anything but locatable—neither here nor there, they are
less absences or nonbeings than bodies in the midst of becoming, what hole theorists
Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi characterize as immaterial bodies. Of holes, they
write:
They are not parts of the material objects they are hosted in (though it is
sometimes by removing a part of the host that a hole is created); rather, they
are immaterial bodies, located at the surfaces of their hosts.48
These immaterial bodies are virtual companions or familiars—
neither beings nor nonbeings, but promising strangers that emerge only in response
to a hosting. Deleuze and Guattari write of the necessity of tearing such holes through
clichés and opinion to enable the arrival of difference in the form of chaosmos: “A

W e l c o m e t o W e t w a r e s ™ , N . 0
chaosmos, a composed chaos—neither foreseen nor preconceived . . . Art struggles
with chaos but it does so to render it sensory.”49 Composed of sensational events, art
hosts such openings in the form of affects such as indiscernibility.
When Fontana slashes the colored canvas with a razor, he does not tear the
color in doing this. On the contrary, he makes us see the area of plain uniform
color, of pure color, through the slit. Art indeed struggles with chaos, but it
does so in order to bring forth a vision that illuminates it for an instant, a
Sensation.50
Fontana’s cut of the canvas connects paint to a vision that transpires in a zone of in-
discernibility. Is such a hole inside or outside the painting?
Technoscience, too, engages in such a struggle or a grapple—it
is seduced by all that exceeds it: “science cannot avoid experiencing a profound attrac-
tion for the chaos with which it battles.”51 Sometimes this battle—rather than a war—
involves a similar slashing tactic—a cut that connects, a rendering indiscernible be-
tween science and fiction, science/fiction.52 Practices of chaosmosis—a welcoming
neither foreseen nor preconceived—enable both ruptures and connections through
which transformative networks of technoscience and wetwares sometimes emerge.
Maybe the book had become this sort of familiar to him, a graft
that interrupted the host’s sense of the interior of the world and its exterior, an orifice
for action at a distance, distribution.

O N E

Panic . . . the sudden, intolerable knowing that everything is alive.
William S. Burroughs, Ghost of Chance
From Agents to Events: Distributing Life
everyone knows that in 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick diagrammed the
structural and functional characteristics of the double helical molecule deoxyribo-
nucleic acid. Much of the rhetoric of this remarkable achievement suggested that
Life’s secret had finally been uncovered, and that Life was therefore localized in the
agency of genes. Watson, writing in his autobiography named for a molecule, put it
this way: “In order to know what life is, we must know how genes act.”1 The action
and manipulation of nucleic acids became the hallmark of a molecular biology that
no longer analyses organisms but—in symbiosis with stock markets and venture
capitalists—transforms them, generating life-forms without precedent.
And yet this localization of life onto genetic actors—“what life
is”—has also enabled an astonishing distribution of vitality, one that allows us to
speak of “artificial life,” simulacra that are not simply models of life but are in fact
instances of it. In short, life is no longer confined to the operation of DNA but is in-
stead linked to the informatic events associated with nucleic acids: operations of
Representing Life for a Living

coding, replication, and mutation. I will argue in this segment that the emergence of
artificial life signals more than the liberation of living systems from carbon—it maps
a transformation of the scientific concept of life itself, a shift from an understanding
of organisms as localized agents to an articulation of living systems as distributed events.
Not located in any particular space and time, living systems are in this view under-
stood as unfolding processes whose most compressed descriptions are to be found in
the events themselves—growing explanations.2 This chapter will focus primarily on
the challenges that such a transformation poses for our means of representing life in
both scientific and extrascientific texts. I analyze both rhetorical milieus, not because
such realms of discourse are equivalent, but because they can sometimes fruitfully
borrow from each other. Indeed, as I hope to make clear, the rhetorical practices in-
volved in such representations of life are potent allies in the transformation of life, as
rhetorical “softwares” become elements in the very network through which artificial
life becomes lively.
Alife Makes Me Nervous
Alife, I must admit, makes me nervous. This wracking of my nerves is not the deep
anxiety of any fear and loathing of machines, those alleged alienators of souls, labor,
depth, bodies—in short “‘technology.” No, alife is like a joke that I just can’t seem
to get. You know the feeling. Oh. I’ll admit that some of the creatures are, well, cute,
that they scamper across my screen, seemingly out of control, on the same drugged
electricity as the Energizer battery bunny. Sometimes I’ll get all enthused about a
simulation, sitting at my desk while I simulate work, and fetch a colleague from
across the hall. “Look!” I’ll say.” “Look! IT’S ALIVE!” and point at the swirling,
flickering, flocking pixels. “It’s alive!”
There just seems to be no convincing him. I’ve even tried the
old rhetorical ploy of implicating my neighbor in a simulation. With LifeMaker, a
cellular automata program available on the web, I spelled out his name in “cells” and
put the simulation on ultrafast. The cells swirled, flickered, and dissolved the writing
and produced something more akin to a proliferating growth than a name. My col-
league, a Joyce scholar, just looks at the screen, then at me, and deadpans “It’s just
language, rhetoric boy.”
In these situations I realize that I am being called upon to justify
my expertise, so I lean back in my chair, do my best impression of a professor, and
provide some historical and cultural context.
“Just information, you mean.” I say this as if I have trumped him,
as if the distinction is itself so stuffed with information that the scales should fall from
his eyes. “But since Erwin Schrödinger’s articulation of the genetic substance as a
‘code-script’ in 1943, life itself has gradually been conflated with information. The
trajectory is long and complex—from George Gamow’s 1954 discussion of the “dia-
mond code” scheme for the translation of DNA into proteins, Jacques Monod and
François Jacob’s research on induction and the genetic “program,” to the recent human
genome initiatives and their mapping and decoding of the “Book of Life”—but suf-
fice to say that from the perspective of many contemporary biologists, life is just an
interesting configuration of information. Biologist Richard Dawkins, who you may
have read about in the New Yorker, has claimed that we are nothing but ‘lumbering
robots,’ vehicles for the propagation of DNA. We’re like the host, it’s the parasite.
Or maybe it’s the other way around.”
“I still don’t get it. Which part is alive?”
At this point I despair, because, I have to admit, it starts to feel
like I am explaining a joke, a task that is neither fun nor funny. I can’t really pull off
the knowing, laughing: “Oh, you don’t get it. Well, if you don’t get it, I can’t really ex-
plain it. It would just take too long.” At least, I can’t say any of that. So all I can really
do is imply it, suggest through my silence that it’s a generational, theoretical thing.
Perhaps he doesn’t have the secret poststructuralist alife decoder ring, I suggest
through my silence. “I’ll give you a copy of this segment I am writing about alife
when I am done,” I say. “Maybe that’ll help.”
So alife makes me nervous because it seems to be inarticulable in
some way. And periodically, I don’t get the joke. But it also makes me nervous because
I can’t simply write it off. Because there is something uncanny about alife. It’s a creepy
doubling of something that no longer appears: “Life.”
“Life,” as a scientific object, has been stealthed, rendered indis-
cernible by our installed systems of representation. No longer the attribute of a sov-
ereign in battle with its evolutionary problem set, the organism its sign of ongoing
but always temporary victory, life now resounds not so much within sturdy boundaries
as between them. The very success of the informatic paradigm, in fields as diverse as
molecular biology and ecology, has paradoxically dislocated the very object of bio-
logical research. “Biologists no longer study life today,”3 writes Nobel Prize winning
molecular biologist François Jacob, “they study living systems.” This “postvital” biol-
ogy is, by and large, interested less in the characteristics and functions of living or-
ganisms than in sequences of molecules and their effects. These sequences are them-
selves articulable though databases and networks; they therefore garner their effects
through relentless repetitions and refrains, connections and blockages rather than
through the autonomous interiority of an organism. This transformation of the

twentieth century life sciences, while hardly homogeneous and not univocal, marks a
change in kind for biology, whose very object has shifted, become distributed.
Consider, for example, the Boolean networks of Stuart Kauffman’s
research discussed above. Kauffman argues in his work that such nets—networks of
buttons threaded to each other in a random pattern—display autocatalytic configu-
rations after a phase transition when the ratio of threads to buttons reaches .5, after
which “all of sudden most of the clusters have become cross-connected into one giant
structure.”4 Kauffman and others find this deep principle of autocatalytic nets to be
suggestive of another transition—that at the origin of life:
The rather sudden change in the size of the largest connected cluster of
buttons, as the ratio of threads to buttons passes .5, is a toy version of the
phase transition that I believe led to the origin of life.5
The paradox of such a formulation emerges around the depen-
dence of this remarkable model on the “sudden” quality of the transition. Precisely
the power of such a network—a persuasiveness that would link surprise to the very
emergence of life—renders a difficult problem for a rhetoric that could narrate such
a “sudden change”—It’s alive! How to articulate such a parallel event, an event in
which difference emerges not in a serial, one-after-another story, but all at once, all of
a sudden? To visualize this change in kind, Kauffman’s own visual rhetoric has recourse
to a flicker or a blinking when he constructs a Boolean net composed of bulbs that
light up based on their logical states:
I will assign to each light bulb one of the possible Boolean functions . . .
AND function to bulb 1 and the OR function to bulbs 2 and 3. At each tick
of the clock each bulb examines the activities of its two inputs and adopts the
state 1 or 0 specified by its Boolean function. The result is a kaleidoscopic
blinking as pattern after pattern unfolds.6
Crucial to representing such a networked understanding of life is
a semiotic state that, like Levy’s parachutist, is neither here nor there—the flicker of
such a “kaleidoscopic blinking” signals less the location of any orderly pattern than its
status as a fluctuation—a configuration that emerges precisely between locations rather
than “in” any given node of the network. The blinking—neither on nor off, but the
difference between on and off—signals the capacity of each specific type of network—
such as Kauffman’s K � 2 networks, where each bulb is connected to two other
nodes—for orderly patterns. In short, even in models of that allegedly singular event,
the origin of life, articulations of life involve a multiplicity—multiple nodes—whose

“liveliness” emerges between locations.7 This notion of life relies less on classical con-
ceptions of autonomy than on a rigorous capacity for connection, orderly ensembles
representable only as transformations, flickering patterns unfolding in space and time.
This makes alife’s claims concerning the vitality of virtual organ-
isms all the more perplexing. For if life seems to have disappeared as a sovereign en-
tity and joined the ranks of all those other relational attributes—economic value, for
example—then it seems odd that it should reappear, so visibly, on my screen.8 It’s
enough to make one believe in time travel. It’s as if computers, with the right soft-
wares, could travel back to a past when life was an autonomous attribute of organ-
isms, capture it, and display it on the screen.
Heterodox theoretical biologist Marcello Barbieri has argued in
this context that organisms have always already been networks. Moving beyond a
rendering of the organism into the duality of “genotype” and “phenotype,” Barbieri
argues that living systems must be understood as a tripartite ensemble of genotype,
hereditary information primarily although not exclusively born by DNA; ribotype,
the swarm of translational apparatuses that transform DNA into the tertiary structures
of folded proteins; and phenotype, the dynamic embodiment of these informations
and their transformations.9 Crucial to Barbieri’s argument is the recognition that
DNA “information” is necessary but not sufficient for the emergence of life; yet an-
other translational actant is needed to transform the immortal syntax of nucleic acids
into the somatic semantics of living systems.
By analogy, I want to suggest that alife, too, emerges only through
the complex of translational mechanisms that render it articulable as “lively.” The
ribotype that transforms the coded iterations and differences of alife softwares into
the lifelike behavior of artificial life is composed of, among other things, “rhetorical
softwares.” These rhetorical formulations—as simple as a newly coined metaphor or
as complex as an entire discourse—don’t “construct” scientific objects so much as
they discipline them, render them available for scientific observation, analysis, and
argument, much as the flicker of bulbs images Kauffman’s autocatalytic order above.
The rhetorical challenge posed by life that emerges out of networks goes beyond the
ontological uncertainty that haunts artificial life—are they really alive?—and becomes
a problem of articulation: How can something that dwells not in a place but in virtu-
ality, a network, be rendered? Hence rhetorical problems haunt not simply the status
of alife creatures, but their location.10
It is perhaps due to this uncanny distribution of life that the par-
allel rhetorical formulations of “localization” and “ubiquity” have particular force on
artificial life, even as these effects are in tension. Rhetorics of “localization” suggest

that some particular organism “in” or “on” the computer is “alive,” thereby occluding
the complex ecology of brains, flesh, code, and electric grids that alife thrives on and
enabling the usual habits of narrative—an actor moving serially through a world—to
flourish, as a more recognizable and perhaps seductive understanding of an organism
as “agent” survives. At the same time, rhetorics of “ubiquity” provoke the possibility
that, as in Burroughs’s observation above, anything could be alive, leaving the observer
continually alert to the signs of vitality in the midst of machines. It is this latter effect
that produces much of the excitement of artificial life, a sublime incapacity to render
the sudden, ubiquitous complexity of a phase transition into the sequential operations
of narrative.11
All scientific practices are differently comported by their rhetor-
ical softwares: my focus has been on the researches and insights enabled by articula-
tions of organisms as extensions of “code.” But alife is in a slightly different position
with respect to its rhetorical components, as the actual difference of artificial life, as
“life,” is continually at stake. This crisis of vitality that pervades alife is not simply
due to alife’s status as a “simulation”; as I suggested above, alife merges out of a con-
text in which quite literally, life disappears, as the “life effect” becomes representable
through the flicker of networks rather than articulable and definable locales. As re-
searcher Pierre Lévy writes, “Virtualization comes as a shock to the traditional nar-
rative.”12 My challenge here will be to determine the specific rhetorical mechanisms
that enable the narration and instantiation of some versions of artificial life, a wetware
ribotype that makes alife such lively creatures at this moment.
As virtual organisms, alife creatures are not fake. Like all simu-
lacra, they are copies without original, producing an effect not of reference—what
would they refer to?—but of provocation, the uncanny feeling of familiarity in the
unfamiliar realm of the computer screen. They double and fold the organic into the
virtual, a hybridization of machine and organism that, inevitably, makes one laugh.
We laugh nervously because while we are not in a state of Burroughsian Panic, all of
the technological in Frankensteinian rebirth, full of life—no conspiracy involving a
toaster, chainsaw, and a couple of CD players is in the cards—we nonetheless get
the sense that indeed anything could be alive. This is the first element I’ll assay in the
ribotype of artificial life, a rhetorical ensemble that smears the borders between the
computer and its environment, what we could call a silicon abduction.
Abducted by Silicon
If artificial life creatures, as actualizations of information, enjoy the burdens and
benefits of vitality, they do so through the operation of what Charles Sanders Peirce

characterized as “abduction.” Peirce, a nineteenth century polymath contributor
to mathematics, semiotics, and philosophy, formulated his theory of abduction in
order to supplement the more traditional logical categories of induction and deduc-
tion. Scientific thinking, Peirce held, didn’t always proceed via the clean operation
of these categories. Kepler’s discovery of the laws of planetary motion was among
Peirce’s favorite examples of a scientific practice that differed from these logical
frameworks. Abduction, as a category of reasoning, is characterized by its reliance
on an absence:
An abduction is a method of forming a general prediction without any positive
assurance that it will succeed either in the special case or usually, its justifica-
tion being that it is the only possible hope of regulating our future conduct
rationally, and that induction from past experience gives us strong encourage-
ment to hope that it will be successful in the future.13
A missing term—one that may possibly arrive in the future—completes abduction’s
argument. The “possibility” that inheres in any specific abductive enterprise is teth-
ered to the pathos of “hope,” an encounter with the future without grounds but with
calculation, anticipation, and a bit of desperation—“the only possible hope of regu-
lating our future conduct rationally.” The past, too, offers itself up as a support to
abductive reasoning, but only in the form of the “inductive” habit that Peirce identi-
fies with sheer repetition and persistence, attributes that do little to aid in the evalu-
ation of any future event.
Still, Peirce favored abduction because it seemed to be the only
office of reasoning that allowed for the arrival of a novel, unprecedented thought.
Induction, tied to habit, tends to subsume each event into the Same, and the logical
necessity of the deductive syllogism relies on full knowledge of all the premises,
knowledge that, by definition, is not available in exploratory scientific enterprise.14
Thus Peirce sought to describe the persuasive force of abduction—what he sometimes
called “hypothesis”—in terms other than those reserved for logic:
Hypothesis substitutes, for a complicated tangle of predicates attached to
one subject, a single conception. Now there is a peculiar sensation belonging
to the act of thinking that each of these predicates inheres in the subject. In
hypothetic inference this complicated feeling so produced is replaced by a
single feeling of greater intensity, that belonging to the act of thinking the
hypothetical conclusion . . . We may say, therefore, that hypothesis produces
the sensuous of thought, and induction the habitual element.15

Peirce’s rhetoric and semiotics sought, among other things, to materialize our under-
standings of language and conviction, so the “sensuous” character of abductive think-
ing should not be read through the lens of the Platonic and Aristotelian suspicions
of pathos. Instead, Peirce offers it as a description of the operation of the only mode
of reasoning that seems fit for an encounter with the future, a deployment of persua-
sive force that gambles on the unprecedented. Such a gamble works through an in-
tensive practice of substitution—a single concept is swapped for a tangle.
In Christopher Langton’s 1987 manifesto for artificial life, pre-
cisely such an encounter with the future takes place. The missing term in the abduc-
tive transaction is “life.” Writing of biology’s need to expand its purview and look at
material substrates other than carbon, Langton writes that the traditional narrow
context of biology(!) makes it impossible for researchers to really “understand” life.
“Only when we are able to view life-as-we-know-it in the larger context of life-as-it-
could-be will we really understand the nature of the beast.” With this claim, Langton
offers a formalist definition of life, one that argues that the phenomenon of living
systems is tied to organizational and not material attributes. This hypothesis is not
itself new—Maturana and Varela’s notion of “autopoietic” machines also argues that
life is an organizational phenomenon, one that is perhaps independent of its material
instantiation. Indeed, the rhetorical practices of “information” that have transformed
the life sciences support such a dislocated conception of living systems, as “informa-
tion” becomes mobile, capable of instantiation in contexts other than its origin. What
is peculiar to Langton’s abductive move is the claim that one can only understand life
adequately on the basis of its instantiation elsewhere: “life writ large across all mate-
rial substrates . . . is the true subject matter of biology.” A larger sample size, so the
argument goes, might help us understand both what’s peculiar to carbon-based life
and to what more general descriptions and laws govern living systems, a kind of
metalife.
A tension or even a tangle emerges from this bold move into the
“synthetic approach to biology” where organisms emerge in silico. What Langton
proposes is as novel a shift for biology as the discovery and study of microscopic or-
ganisms with Leeuwenhoek’s deployment of the microscope. Instead of greater
magnification that allows for the representation of a new realm of the organic, the
iterative capabilities of the computer make visible the lively and self-organizing ca-
pacities of an inorganic stratum. And yet, in its logical formulation, Langton’s claim
depends upon the very knowledge that it seeks. The very “understanding” that is in-
tended to orient the life sciences—“the true subject matter of biology”—is yet to
come, bundled with an analysis of “life-as-it-could-be.” In the meantime, our very

criteria for identifying and studying living systems remain vague, operational defin-
itions haunted by their character as simulacra. The very impetus for artificial life re-
search—the lack of sufficient knowledge of the formal attributes of life—stymies
what Langton will call the “big claim” of artificial life, a claim that defines in silico
creatures as “alive.”
The big claim is that a properly organized set of artificial primitives carrying
out the same functional roles as biomolecules in natural living systems will
support a process that will be “alive” in the same way that natural organisms
are alive. Artificial Life will therefore be genuine life—it will simply be made
out of different stuff than the life that has evolved here on Earth.16
This claim, anchored as it is in an understanding of the “way that natural organisms
are alive,” begs the very question that alife allegedly illuminates: What “way,” pre-
cisely, are natural organisms alive?
But, as Peirce pointed out, the dependence of an abductive argu-
ment on a term that is yet to come, off the Earth—such as “life-as-it-could-be”—is
not simply lacking in logical coherence; such an opening toward the future allows
for the contingent, even improbable arrival of precisely such a missing term. Indeed,
Peirce writes of abduction: “Never mind how improbable these suppositions are;
everything which happens is infinitely improbable.”17 For Langton, the supposition
of a synthetic biology substitutes for, even doubles, yet another supposition:
Since it is quite unlikely that organisms based on different physical chemistries
will present themselves to us for study in the foreseeable future, our only al-
ternative is to try to synthesize alternative life-forms ourselves—Artificial
Life: life made by man rather than by nature.18
How might such organisms “present themselves” to humans? The enjoyment of
Langton’s joke depends upon our capacity to abide the exchange of one improbability
for another: it seems, for some reason, more likely that we can fabricate life than
that aliens will arrive any time soon. Along with that other alien contact strategy
SETI, however, alife comes up against an operational difficulty: How to determine
whether its object is “really” alive?19
To this query, Langton implicitly offers an intriguing answer.
Discussing the transformation of an artificial life “genotype” or GTYPE into its
“phenotype” or PTYPE, Langton traces out an irreducible contingency in artificial
life, and perhaps, life:

It is not possible in the general case to adduce which specific alterations
must be made to a GTYPE to effect a desired change in the PTYPE. The
problem is that any specific PTYPE trait is, in general, an effect of many
nonlinear interactions between the behavioral primitives of the system. Con-
sequently, given an arbitrary proposed change to the PTYPE, it may be im-
possible to determine by any formal procedure exactly what changes would
have to be made to the GTYPE to effect that—and only that—change in the
PTYPE. It is not a practically computable problem. There is no way to cal-
culate the answer—short of exhaustive search—even though there may be an
answer.20
Assuming that an attribute of PTYPE would be “living,” then, no inspection of any
GTYPE can yield an understanding of any PTYPE’s liveliness. What, then, would
provide the alife researcher with an understanding of the liveliness of a PTYPE?
“Trial and error,” Langton claims, is “the only way to proceed in
the face of such an unpredictability.” On this abductive account—it can only make
assumptions in the face of the future—alife phenotypes, PTYPES, can only emerge
through the actual execution of an algorithm—its translation and “expression,” a
process that is itself characterized by multiple levels of interaction:
It should be noted that the PTYPE is a multilevel phenomenon. First, there
is the PTYPE associated with each particular instruction—the effect that
the instruction has on the entity’s behavior when it is expressed. Second,
there is the PTYPE associated with each individual entity—its individual
behavior within the aggregate. Third, there is the PTYPE associated with
the aggregate as a whole.21
Thus the actual status of any alife creature cannot be inferred from its initial config-
uration—GTYPE—and its expression is characterized by levels, thresholds that are
themselves the outcome of multiple “non-linear interactions.” If life, as Langton
claims, is not “stuff,” but is instead an “effect,” then the effects of liveliness can only
be articulated after the execution, as it were, of the alife code.
What I want to suggest is that at each level, acts of translation
occur. “Within “the screen, alife organisms survive based on their interactions with
both their virtual environment and other alife creatures. So, for example, the strange
dogs called “Moofs” that sometimes populate SimLife emerge as “translations” of
their digital genomes, and one can tinker with the genomes in the hope of tweaking
Moof success and behavior, but the ecology even of a simple program like SimLife is

sufficiently complex that one cannot predict the effect on the Moof phenotype, at
least in terms of its behavior within the virtual ecology that it inhabits.
Representing Life for a Living
But once we shift our focus from the alleged interior of the computer, we encounter
yet another translation practice. Moofs are inoculated into the virtual ecology of
Simlife based on the preferences and habits of the humans interacting with them.
The overall success of an alife world—the number of times that a mass of organisms
sprout on silicon substrates all over the Earth—depends on their ability to seduce
humans. That is, their “liveliness”—their ability to achieve the reproductive success
and other “lifelike behaviors” in the virtual ecology of the computer—depends on
their success in representing “life” to their human wetware. This would be simply
tautological were it not for the fact that our definitions of life are themselves, at best,
recursive—ongoing feedback loops whose origin and destination are quite simply
non sequiturs.
Even the definition of life emerges less from a sequence than a
tangle, a complex of interaction that conjoins rather than demarcates life from its al-
leged others, such as machines and avatars. Gaia, for example, both names the emer-
gence of the earth as a superorganism and announces the immense capacities of
“matter” to be imbricated and infiltrated with life: It’s alive! Lynn Margulis’s analyses
of symbiogenesis and Gaia both suggest a strange capacity to be invaded character-
istic of both the earth and the nucleated cell. In this frame, the eukaryotic cell
emerges not only through a parasitic invasion by bacterial DNA on a prokaryotic
cell, or, conversely, via the consumption of prey DNA by a predator, but from the
supple and specific capacities to be invaded co-evolving with the prokaryotic cell.
This capacity to survive an inhabitation is just as important as the bacterial “tolerance
for their predators” that allowed select bacteria to live off the hospitality of the cell
and avoid consumption.22
According to Margulis, it was probably the evolution of a pro-
tective membrane that allowed early prokaryotes to survive the “poisonous guests.”
Thus vital to Margulis’s account of the bacterial deterritorialization through which a
new form of cell emerged was a form of blockage—a blockage of its DNA.23 What
would be the analogous operation in alife, if there is one?
Perhaps it is in the blockage of the self that alife proceeds. As fa-
miliars, alife offers itself only through the production of indiscernibility—the sud-
den hailing of a life-form, a creation of complicity among humans and machines.

This complicity—as with the long-term embrace of mitochondria and the eukaryotic
cell—emerges out of a liaison whose very operation entails a temporary blockage or
even suspension of the self, a self that would wield control over the machine.
This self must be actively blocked or distracted through visible
and sometimes narratable tactics, some of which are more successful than others.
Thus the success of alife organisms in their virtual ecology is tied to their success in
an actual interactive visual ecology, an ecology also populated by humans, in which,
for example, one simply cannot look away. The promise of alife is that something is
always about to happen . . .
Hence the cute, perky vitality of most alife organisms. Alife organ-
isms need not attract in this same way, just as all flowering plants do not tempt the
wasp as the orchid does.24 But alife creatures must indeed represent the life effect in
a fashion that is visible and articulable with the mass of humans interacting with
them. Thus at the level of PTYPE where the speech act “It’s Alive!” emerges, alife
creatures require a ribotypical apparatus that will render them compelling to their
human hosts. If an alife organism falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it,
it only makes a virtual sound. Not because of any allegedly postmodern solipsism at-
tributable to alife creatures, but because actualized alife organisms represent life for a
living. The alife organisms that achieve the most success in Darwinian terms are
those that are most readily and remarkably narrated or otherwise replicated. This is
as much an attribute of alife behavior as their feeding habits, and at the level of the
actual, it is an obligatory passage point for success. Note that this attribute by defin-
ition cannot simply re-present life—what would such a representation look like?—
but must instead provoke, seduce it into actualization. As Pierre Lévy, following
Deleuze’s discussion, writes, “the real resembles the possible whereas the actual responds
to the virtual.”25
I want to be clear that I am not claiming that alife organisms are
simply the result of human “decisions,” or that it is only the rhetorical softwares bun-
dled with alife organisms that make them lively. Such a humanist understanding of
alife would overlook the fact that humans do not simply choose rhetorical practices;
rather, they are persuaded by, and respond to, them. The rhetorical softwares of in-
formation that transformed biology, for example, were less careful deployments of
knowledge than contingent experiments in persuasion. And the success that alife or-
ganisms have as virtual organisms is not “fake”; it is simply another level of PTYPE,
another level of contingency, than the actual.
Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari articulate this
distinction between the actual and the virtual as one based on “chaos,” the sheer

contingency of an unactualized event, a program that may be successfully run. Real
but not actualized, the virtual is a consistency—such as a configuration of code or a
spore—that remains to be executed. The virtual is not, therefore, “unreal.” Nor
does it lack actuality—such a description would depend on an abduction of the future,
a retroactive understanding of the virtual in terms of its instantiation as actual. Nor
is the virtual without the resistances and finitudes we often attribute to the real. It
bears its own constraints—the capacity to be rendered into a virtual substrate of
code, the materiality of its substrate, and perhaps most strangely, the capability of
encountering the difference of the future, to negotiate the catastrophic change in
kind that is the movement from the virtual to the actual, program to instantiation, as
in Kauffman’s “we must instead simply stand back and watch the pageant.” Feminist
thinker Elizabeth Grosz distinguishes this characteristic of the virtual/actual relation
precisely in terms of the occurrence of the future to the virtual, “what befalls it.”
The movement of realisation seems like the concretisation of a preexistent
plan or program; by contrast, the movement of actualisation is the opening
up of the virtual to what befalls it.26
What befalls alife creatures is itself multiple, even a crowd. The
evolution and emergence of artificial life forms occurs in relation to both the mate-
riality of alife’s virtual ecology—my hard disk is getting full!—and its relationships
to other alife creatures. Crucially for alife, though, is the fact that one level of their
actualization depends upon their ability to be “befallen” by human wetware, an actual
response to the virtual. It should be objected that the privilege of this last level of ac-
tualization—the level at which “It’s alive!” emerges—is entirely enmeshed with the
ecology of humans. Thinking the novelty and specificity of artificial life, though, de-
mands that we encounter the crucial ways in which human corporeality is entwined
with alife’s status as “life,” even if it does not dominate alife.27 In some sense that I
will discuss in more detail at some instant in the future, the actualization of alife fa-
miliars as “life” is perhaps the least novel level in the alife PTYPE, one that reterri-
torializes the strange contingencies of the virtual becoming actual into that old saw,
“life.” Indeed, perhaps the simulation of life is but a ruse, a hoax, or stealth tactic
that enables the propagation of entities that dwell much more in alterity than life,
novel entities that mime life as a tactic and not an essence.
Artificial life is not, for example, an operation of simple Darwin-
ian artificial selection where humans breed the liveliest alife creatures, consciously or
unconsciously; instead, alife creatures’ very existence as actualized life, rather than as
interesting enterprises in computation, is enmeshed with the human phenotypes

with which they interact. The “original” status of alife as life—that which makes it
replicable in the first place—is thoroughly bound up with the affect—Peirce’s “sen-
suous character of thought”—of the humans that encounter them.28 At an actualized
level of PTYPE, that level at which alife become replicable as life and spread across
the hard disks and networks of the infosphere, the liveliness of alife creatures is
contingent on the relations between their effects—such as reproduction—and their
ability to be articulated as lively, an ability that does not simply reside in human nar-
rators but is provocative of them.
Still, it is worth considering a general framework for thinking
about how such provocation proceeds. Darwin’s less heralded mechanism of selec-
tion—sexual selection—might connect the representation of life for a living to the
work of rendering life. That is, given that “life” and “representation” are different
effects whose ecologies do not necessarily overlap, how do alife creatures make a liv-
ing, representing life for a living?
In both The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man Darwin re-
minds us over and over that it is not only through war and struggle that evolutionary
fitness emerges. Elaborately choreographed seduction is, for example, an important
vector of ornithological sexual selection, or the struggle for mates among birds of
the same species:
All those who have attended to the subject, believe that there is the severest
rivalry between the males of many species to attract, by singing, the females.
The rock-thrush of Guiana, birds of paradise, and some others, congregate;
and successive males display with the most elaborate care, and show off in
the best manner, their gorgeous plumage; they likewise perform strange antics
before the females, which, standing by as spectators, at last choose the most
attractive partner.29
While the ascription of choice to the female bird here clearly
troubled Darwin with its implications for female agency, he was perhaps more bothered
by the sheer exuberance of plumage, seeing in it a monstrosity exceeding any usual
notion of fitness.
The tuft of hair on the breast of the wild turkey-cock cannot be of any use,
and it is doubtful whether it can be ornamental in the eyes of the female
bird; indeed, had the tuft appeared under domestication, it would have been
called a monstrosity.30

Darwin’s remark here seems to indicate that choice is an inadequate model for think-
ing these scenes of seduction and their feedback onto ornament, song, and speech.
Darwin’s doubt concerning the possible excitement of a female bird by the tom’s
waddle speaks less to Darwin’s impoverished ornithological imagination than it does
to the weakness of the choice model. Indeed, rather than resulting from a site of
careful evaluation and control (such as domestication) the evolution of such spectac-
ularly useless ornaments speaks to the operation not of decision but of emergence:
the monstrousness of the tuft sprouts out of a feedback loop whose origin is neither
male nor female, passive nor active: interaction. In this sense, alife organisms and
humans form an extended, interactive phenotype of each other, with rhetorical soft-
wares serving as the ribotypic translation apparatus that enables this operation of al-
ife code on human bodies and vice versa, the becoming-silicon of flesh, the becoming-
flesh of silicon. On Darwin’s model, perhaps artificial life is in an instance of
trans-species sexual selection.31
As with the other levels of translation, one simply cannot tell in
advance if a given RTYPE/PTYPE interaction will succeed in yielding organisms
that will achieve actualized success as lively. Each rhetorical software or ribotype
must be run—and the alife organisms’ “lives,” as actualized lives, are at stake. It is
only in practice—what befalls the GTYPE and is contingent virtual vitality—that
the actualized vitality of the alife organism can emerge. Indeed, in some sense it is
only in the future that such liveliness can occur, for each practice encounters the
news that any formal definition of life is yet to come.
Perhaps there is good reason for the apparently irreducible con-
tingency of the GTYPE /RTYPE /PTYPE interaction. John Von Neumann, poly-
math propagator of the theory of self-reproducing automata, describes complexity as
being more difficult to describe than to practice:
There is a good deal in formal logics to indicate that the description of the
functions of an automaton is simpler than the automaton itself, as long as
the automaton is not very complicated, but that when you get to high compli-
cations, the actual object is simpler than the literary description. (emphasis added)32
However one characterizes the life effect, it is certainly “complicated”—it involves
passages over borders, the organization of a “complex” or an ecology. As with Kauff-
man’s discussion of irreducibility in Chapter 0, the description or translation of the
liveliness of artificial life is perhaps more complex than the automata of alife them-
selves. As in the joke I mentioned above, it is perhaps simpler to practice or “grow”

alife than it is to describe it. Truly an abductive enterprise, alife continually seeks
confirmation in a practice that is yet to come—the translation of alife as lively, an
understanding of the formal nature of life, life-as-we-know-it within the context of
life-as-it-could-be.
More than a logical tangle, though, the tactic of interrogating
the comparative probability of artificial life and alien life provokes an experience of
life’s ubiquity—no longer confined either to the planet or to flesh, it finds itself dis-
tributed across the desktop and the universe.
Literary Ribotypes
Not all creatures can be rendered equally visible, narratable and therefore abductable,
so some rhetorical tactics would seem to be more successful than others in the evolv-
ing ribotype of alife and its operations of transhuman sexual selection. In the literary
phylum, authors such as Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs have generated
remarkable rhetorical effects of vitality in diverse and divergent contexts. Dick, the
speed-typing author of over thirty-six novels and several volumes of short stories,
describes “vugs,” a Titanian, silicon-based life form that inhabits his 1963 novel
Game Players of Titan.
They were a silicon-based life form, rather than carbon-based; their cycle
was slow, and involved methane rather than oxygen as the metabolic catalyst.
And they were bisexual . . . “Poke it,” Bill Calumine said to Jack Blau. With
the vug-stick, Jack prodded the jelly-like cytoplasm of the vug. “Go home,”
he told it sharply.33
Dick’s figuration of the in silico creature quickly overtakes the comfortable distance
established between the stick-wielding humans and the amorphous blobs from Titan.
Telepathic, vugs render the distinction between the interiority of a human and its
“outside” indeterminable, as the boundaries of human identity become as fluid as
the physical outline of the vug. Before long, both the characters in and the readers
of Dick’s novel find themselves “surrounded”:
As he sat on the edge of the bed removing his clothes he found something, a
match folder under the lamp by the bed and examined it. . . . On the match
folder, in his own hand penciled words: WE ARE ENTIRELY SURROUNDED
BY BUGS RUGS VUGS.34

Crucial to the effect garnered here—one might call it panic—is the vehicle of vug
knowledge. Writing, that allegedly stable reservoir of memory, becomes the vector
not of certainty but of its disturbance. The reception of a message to oneself becomes
the occasion not just for recall but for the disturbance of recollection. For Dick’s
character, Pete Garden, could not remember writing such a note:
I wonder when I wrote that? In the bar? On the way home? Probably when I
first figured it out, when I was talking with Dr. Philipson.35
By disturbing both the interiority of his characters—through telepathy, you’re think-
ing—and the interiority of his reader—through the suggestion that Dick’s writing,
too, may contain a strange message, one so inarticulable that one must try out differ-
ent bonsonants, ronsonants, consonants—Dick dislocates the vitality of the vug and
distributes it across other substrates. The very existence of a silicon life form immedi-
ately leaves us, possibly, “surrounded,” but Dick’s play on the simulatable character
of life and the incessant movement of writing implicates both his characters and his
readers in a strangely interactive paranoid world where anything, even a book, could
be alive.
This dislocation of vitality from its “home,” carbon, instills many
of Dick’s novels with this uncanny sense of being “surrounded” by vitality. In Radio
Free Albemuth, a novel found with Dick’s papers after his 1982 death, Nicholas Brady
receives a visit from his future self:
He had the impression that the figure, himself, had come back from the future,
perhaps from a point vastly far ahead, to make sure that he, his prior self,
was doing okay at a critical time in his life. The impression was distinct and
strong and he could not rid himself of it.36
This unforgettable memory of the future seemed primarily concerned with one thing:
that the universe is itself alive. Having encountered VALIS—the Vast Active Living
Intelligent System—Brady was now “plugged into” the enormous vitality of the
“void.”
By now I knew what had happened to me; for reasons I did not understand, I
had become plugged into an intergalactic communications network, and I
gazed up trying to locate it, although most likely locating it was impossible.37
Crucial to Dick’s formulation is the notion that such vitality cannot be “located.”
Beyond the boundaries of any given organism—whether human, vug, or the Universe

itself—vitality is characterized by its excess, a surplus that renders the desire to locate
the territory of vitality difficult if not impossible. Only violence—the repetitive
prodding of the vug stick—connects the flowing turbulence of life to its alleged
container, “home,” and the network can be “plugged into” but not located, as each
node leads to another in the distributed effect Dick renders as VALIS, an artificial,
computational but living god.
So too does much of alife create this sense of dislocation, as the
incessant vitality, like the Energizer battery bunny, goes “on and on,” everywhere.
Indeed, as I have noted elsewhere, the practice of alife seems to be involved in the
desire for transcendence, the desire to be “above everywhere,” a position from which
one can articulate, finally, the formal characteristics of life in this moment of its dis-
location. But the excessive, transformative character of alife is effected in more than
a simply transcendental fashion; the pesky vitality periodically invades the “identity”
of the user, that wetware sufficiently charmed by the Tamagotchi to bury it.38 As
a classic installation of subjectivity—the very insemination of the name—nothing
would seem more masterful and transcendental than this act of self-replicating memo-
rialization.39 And yet as a practice of mourning, this electric funeral indexes a com-
plicity with alife as fundamental as any transcendental desire, a vitality at home
nowhere and at play everywhere.
Still, as with Dick’s novels, such vitality exists within a frame: the
virtual ecology of the computer. If, after a time, the reader of Philip K. Dick’s novels
slowly remembers the memorializing capacities of writing, so too does silicon’s vital-
ity remain confined, primarily, to the postvital window through which it emerges. If
the operation of abduction—the encounter with a fundamentally alien, unprecedented
future—makes the appearance of in silico organisms possibly ubiquitous in the distrib-
uted network of contemporary “life,” what ensures the autonomy and isolation of
the vital silicon creature in the context of its leaky legacy of excess?
Life Is for Fetuses; or, Insane in the Membrane
A universe comes into being when space is severed into two. A unity is defined. The
description, invention and manipulation of unities is at the base of all scientific inquiry.
Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela, “Autopoiesis:
the Organization of the Living”

Life itself, a kind of technoscientific deity, may be what is virtually pregnant.
Donna Haraway
Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, in their 1972 text “Autopoiesis: The Or-
ganization of the Living,” offer a general theory of living systems that would char-
acterize the specificity of vital systems in terms of their autonomy.40 In this respect,
Maturana and Varela are placed firmly within an Aristotelian tradition that saw organ-
isms as wholes mobilized by their purpose or “telos,” but with a difference: the
“purpose” of an organism is autonomy itself.
This formulation of a theory of biological systems allows one to
dispense with the classical category of teleology and its shadow of God, but perhaps
more crucially it also enables the evaporation of the distinction between living systems
and machines. In the place of this distinction—one based, perhaps, on some vitalist
trace in biology—Maturana and Varela generate the difference between “autopoietic”
and “allopoietic” machines. Autopoietic machines work on themselves, as it were,
generating their identity as an effect of their ongoing self-organization:
An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a net-
work of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of compo-
nents that produce the components which: (i) through their interactions and
transformations continuously generate and realize the network of processes
(relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it as a concrete unity in
the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological
domain of its realization of such a network.41
Such a lengthy and tangled definition reminds us of Von Neumann’s observation
cited above: that an event as complex as a living system is easier to achieve than to
describe. Still, Maturana and Varela’s definition has serious influence within certain
strands of artificial life, so its rhetorical management of this complex problem—the
very definition and borders of living systems—is crucial to an understanding of the
investment of the interior of autonomous alife organisms with “life.”
On the one hand, it would seem obvious that Maturana and
Varela’s arguments enable artificial life. By decoupling life from its usual lodging (i.e.,
organisms), autopoiesis makes possible the dislodging of life from any organic location
whatsoever. It is in this sense that Maturana and Varela’s work resonates with the
news that living systems are primarily informatic. They seek to situate the autopoietic

effect within a larger integrated process rather than confining it to its network of mol-
ecular effects, even as they refuse the claim that living systems can be characterized
as operations of coding.42
This deterritorialization of life via autopoiesis, then, continued
the erosion of the machine/organism distinction that was wrought by the ascendance
of the postvital understanding of living systems. Unlike the distributed character of
networked life, whose vitality is tied to the possibility of a contingent outside with
which each component could connect, Maturana and Varela’s vision emphasizes the
autonomy and closure of the autopoietic system. If the postvital understanding of
life emphasizes connection—as in Stuart Kauffman’s Boolean nets, where nodes
garner vitality and order through relation to multiple, other nodes—then the cyber-
netic argument of Maturana and Varela renders life as an interiority, one constantly
making itself as a self.
This notion of the interiority that inheres in autopoietic systems
maps logically onto Maturana and Varela’s claim that autopoiesis is “necessary and
sufficient for the occurrence of all biological phenomena.”43 This necessary and suf-
ficient status accorded autopoiesis retains the historical sovereignty and interiority
of life—the agency of an organism consists in its construction only of itself—even
as Maturana and Varela seek to offer a theory of living organizations, a theory that
stresses the relentlessly relational character of living systems.
This self-contained logical character of the autopoietic system—
as necessary and sufficient—marks the topological map of the living system as well.
“In the beginning,” to paraphrase the quote with which I began this segment, “was
the inside and the outside.” The authors begin with this distinction, warranted by
their emphasis on “autonomy,” what they deem to be “so obviously an essential feature
of living systems.”44 For a distinction that possesses so much self-evidence, the claim
for the autonomy of the autopoietic system—that process of self-organization that
emerges between the inside and the outside—poses many problems for Maturana
and Varela. Even as they attempt to demarcate the distinctive qualities of living sys-
tems, they find themselves unable to either confirm or deny the difference between
social organizations and biological ones. Faced with what they see as the ethical
problems that inhere in the answer to such a question, problems they deem to be the
problems of the future, Maturana and Varela defer the answer to this question to the
future itself:
In fact no position or view that has any relevance in the domain of human
relations can be deemed free from ethical and political implications . . . This

responsibility we are ready to take, yet since we—Maturana and Varela—do
not fully agree on an answer to the question . . . we have decided to postpone
this discussion.45
That is, Maturana and Varela cannot agree on the status of the following question:
Are social organizations inside or outside the purview of biological laws? The deci-
sion not to decide, to postpone or defer, allegorizes the futural character of the very
membrane between inside and outside, the autonomy machine, that Maturana and
Varela deploy. Only retroactively—i.e., in the future—is the distinction between inside
and outside self-evident. Far from obvious, the Möbius space of inside and outside
are sites of indeterminacy and undecidability that emerge in the abductive process of
living systems. The very autonomy of them—Maturana and Varela—is threatened
by the force of the problem: they cannot choose not to decide about the future, ethi-
cal problems posed by the theory of autopoiesis they offer.46 Even on Maturana and
Varela’s own terms, such a topological distinction poses a cognitive problem that
“has to do with the capacity of the observer to recognize the relations that define the
system as a unity, and with his capacity to distinguish the boundaries which delimit
the unity in the space in which it is realized.”47
Despite its conceptual trouble, the localization of life rendered
by the theory of autopoiesis does much to ensure the confinement of artificial life in
its window. For with its clear, if tangled, exposition of the claim that autonomy is the
fundamental life “behavior,” they buttress the continuation of the classical claim for
the interiority of organisms even as the life effect is distributed across the multiple
links of networks.
By propagating such a clear demarcation between the inside and
outside of the living system, Maturana and Varela’s argument replicates the historical
comportment of life as an entity distinguishable from its environment. The contem-
porary localization of life extends this encapsulation and treats the fetus as an entity
distinct from its mother’s body. As scholars such as Susan Squier, Barbara Duden,
Karen Newman, Valerie Hartouni, and Donna Haraway have argued, the fetus was
“born” as a distinct entity through rhetorical and visual techniques that severed it
from the maternal body and invested it with “life” and subjectivity. Both the rhetorics
of “choice” and “prolife,” Newman argues, emerge out of a discourse full of rights-
laden bodies, individuals in direct conflict that paradoxically dwell in the same body.
While Newman overlooks the historical transformations of “life” in the period that
she analyzes, she carefully documents the persistent, historical occlusion of the mater-
nal body and the emergence of the fetus, an emergence that functions through the

attribution of distinct interiority to an entity that is, paradoxically, inside the invisible
maternal body.
Donna Haraway, in “The Virtual Speculum in the New World
Order,” highlights the particularly odd status of such a distinct fetus at a moment
when life has been dislocated. Haraway offers multiple readings of a cartoon that she
dubs “Virtual Speculum,” which features
a female nude . . . in the position of Adam, whose hand is extended to the cre-
ative interface with not God the Father but a keyboard for a computer whose
display screen shows the global digital fetus in its amniotic sac.48
Among Haraway’s proliferating readings, she argues that the digital fetus is “liter-
ally. . . somehow in the computer” and thus “more connected to downloading than
birth or abortion . . . the on-screen fetus is an artificial life form.”49
In Haraway’s formulation of the “fetus in cyberspace,” the topo-
logical comportment of life as outlined by Maturana and Varela returns; life is con-
ceptually or “virtually pregnant”—disturbed at its border between “inside” and “out-
side,” a fetus “in” a nonspace, life has missed its (historical) period. The conundrum
posed by Virtual Speculum is literally: Where is life? Its “source” appears to be the
gleaming screen of the workstation, as capital transforms more than the global mar-
kets via the new technologies of pixel, keyboard, and perhaps network. But such a
reading immediately overlooks the corporeal connection of the female nude, whose
hand touches the keypad, whose digits, perhaps, experience the pain of labor via
carpal tunnel syndrome. Thus the “digital” fetus, awash in amniotic and semiotic
fluid, exemplifies the persistent exteriority of living systems. Even under its greatest
ideological pressure to be an interiority—the fetus in a box—life resists attributions
of autonomy as effectively as genetically modified corn finds its way into a taco
shell.50 Impossible to locate, the life effect occupies a Möbius body, a rhizome that
traverses the interiority of the screen and its outside. As a membrane, the screen
marks less a clean boundary than a multiplicity. Difficult to narrate—which is before,
which after?—such a multiplicity fosters the implosion of the virtual and the actual
even as it highlights an odd morphology of life whose representation is a fluctuating
network rather than an organism.
The sheer strangeness of this entanglement—the becoming flesh
of silicon, the becoming silicon of flesh—seems to foster an abduction, one that
forestalls the difference of the future by substituting “for a complicated tangle of
predicates attached to one subject, a single conception,” i.e. life. Newman describes

this demand as a “referential panic, a need for realist images” that would render the
strange new tangles of technoscience and “life” consumable and narratable.
And yet this panic is not confined to the work of representation—
alife’s power emerges not out of the barrel of a gun, but from the gestures of mouse
and pixel, signifying and asignifying grapples with the machinic phylum. To be sure,
the familiar seductions of alife are rhetorical, but they involve the sculpted, implicitly
choreographed movements of bodies as well as the affects provoked by the encounter
with alife creatures.

T W O

(10) Enter
as both familiar and attribute of a network, life has been distributed out of the organ-
ism and into the living room. Formerly attributed to the cyborg assemblage of or-
ganism and machine, announced by the tell tale metronomic, metonymic, cybernetic
beep and the flashing of a pixel on its screen, vital signs now refer to an intense tex-
tuality at play in the life sciences, a textuality in which “life” chiasmatically implodes
into “information,” and signs ecstatically code and decode themselves to vitality in
an out-of-body experience. No longer distributed among the machine/organism
nexus, vital signs now refer to the sovereign and self-referential status of the timeless
immortality of deoxyribonucleic acid. Between DNA and its effects, we have the
perfect geometry of an arrow, a diagrammatic vector that at once marks out and
erases the emerging deterritorialization of organisms.
As I have argued in the first segments of this book, this intense
distribution and outsourcing of life is more than a shift in scientific perception—it
alters the contours of corporeal experience, as life ceases to be confined to the interi-
ority of a body and becomes capable of inhabiting locations between bodies: networks,
futures, virtualities. In this segment I want to map out the peculiar and sometimes
spectacular becomings enabled by one such body practice: SimLife, a popular and
very trailing edge artificial-life program by the Maxis Corporation. As recipes for
Simflesh, Simbones:
At Play in the
Artificial Life Ribotype

becoming, SimLife’s algorithms of vitality create quirky linkages between interactive
entertainment (inter-tainment) and technoscientific articulations of life. As interactive,
affective familiars that emerge only out of that ecology of response I sketched in the
first pages of this book, these artificial life-forms hack intimately and delicately on
the tortuous and twisted relations among humans and machines. As life becomes a
distributed response that emerges only through a fluctuating encounter of multiplic-
ities, the always troubled distinction between “nature” and “culture” becomes less an
opposition than an agonistic and, as I invoked above, sexual interface. Cryonics—the
organized freezing of animal and often human remains—emerges out of a similarly
distributing response: vitality becomes distributed over time as well as space. Indeed,
in some sense both artificial life and cryonics are generative and exuberant responses
to the new connectivities proffered by the post vital life sciences. Artificial life, of
course, emerges from our arrow: the conflative connection of life and information
makes it possible. In that light, cryonics might be seen as an odd vestige of the old
corporeality, where the body, like the buggy whip, persists long after it is “needed.”
Such a judgment, though, forgets the retooled nature of the post vital body; it is not
lost or forgotten so much as in transit, becoming code—the cryonic body is hooked
up to the future, a future I take up in later pages.
In mappings that follow, I hope to highlight the possibilities for
lines of flight, political, ecstatic and otherwise, in the emerging nexus of bodies and
machines that I will outline here. Stolen from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
“lines of flight” emerge with effects that are, as we used to say, something else, blockages
of contemporary formations of power/knowledge.1 For although the perfect geometry
of the arrow, the informational vector that, for much of hegemonic molecular biol-
ogy, leads directly from DNA to “us” without pausing for difference, we must not
forget the possibility that the arrow makes possible a movement elsewhere.
(20) MOUSE EVENT: Double Click on “Avatar”
It’s in the laboratories where genetic fantasies are the last avatar of the western dream, the
ultimate point of this double and dangerous ambition: purity of choice and descendence.
Jacques Attali
He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the moving illustration drawn by
his computer according to specifications coming down the fibre optic cable. The people are

S i m f l e s h , S i m b o n e s
pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to
communicate with each other in the Metaverse.
Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash
As an “avatar” of the Western dream, genetic engineering and its attendant fantasies
are not merely the natural outcome of a scientific and cultural polymerase chain reac-
tion that began sometime in the 1970s, although that would be a fine metaphor to
pursue.2 Instead, biotechnology and its signs stitch together an avatar, a virtual site
of interaction where nucleic acids, science fictions, softwares, the New York Times,
and some persistent dreams of the West flash on and off in a complex morphology of
the “gene” or “DNA.” This morphology itself is a dynamic one, an interactive, ani-
mated narrative of technoscience and culture that, like the molecules it describes and
inscribes, must be seen to be complexly and rhizomatically in play. Here the distinc-
tions between life and information, lab and living room, segment and rant, scientific
and popular culture implode, collide in a space “beyond” the computer screen. No
longer pressing our collective noses up against the glass or mirror of nature, we now
find that we have passed through to another side, one where the oppositions be-
tween nature and culture confuse, collide and ricochet in a unpredictable matrix of
work/play/simulation. Scientist George Wald, as quoted by J. D. Bernal in 1967,
sums up an isomorphic crossover, one triggered by research into the origin of life:
We have been told so often and on such tremendous authority as to seem to
put it beyond question, that the essence of things must remain forever hidden
from us; that we must stand forever outside nature, like children with their
noses pressed against the glass, able to look in, but unable to enter. This
concept of our origins encourages another view of the matter. We are not
looking into the universe from the outside. We are looking at it from inside.
Its history is our history; its stuff, our stuff. From that realization we can
take some assurance that what we see is real.3
This movement from the “outside” to the “inside” is instructive. Whereas much tradi-
tional scientific subjectivity describes a scientific gaze as cleft from its object, every-
where and nowhere, hovering above the earth, Wald articulates a complicit empiri-
cism, one that finds “assurance” in the irreducibly situated character of scientific
knowledge production. On one register, it is this very solace that needs to be marked
here, the metaphysical comfort derived from the proprietary identification of “its
stuff” as “our stuff.” In this move of “assurance,” the world is once again rendered as

a mere resource for humans, “us,” collaborating in the tedious repetition of transcen-
dence, one that finds certitude in seeing humans “on” the earth.
At the same time, Wald’s move—the transformation of the
human/nature opposition into a membrane of complicity—names the strangely ec-
static operation of “looking at it from inside.” “Its history is our history” disables
any hygienic corridor between “nature” and “culture” and suggests a complex of en-
tanglement in which humans are both “on” and “inside” the earth and cosmos,
chaosmosis. The infinite proximity of history provokes an extraordinary and not
simply semantic exposure to the universe, an exposure “we” now suffer differentially
and enjoy. This “realization” is not necessarily mediated primarily by a patient gather-
ing of knowledge but by an ecstasis, the sudden surprise at the proximity and yet
sheer alterity of the universe. Implicated and entangled in “stuff,” Wald’s gaze oper-
ates as an excited attractor for becoming as it provokes the experience of the inces-
sant and, not necessarily computable interconnections of “stuff.”4
This recipe for becoming—a disciplined practice of transforming
the relations between human interiority and its diverse outsides—is cultivated in the
new fluidities of inside and outside rather than their disappearance. The turbulent
practice connecting inside and outside in Wald’s analysis provokes not simply because
of a logical or epistemological disturbance, but through an almost tactile experience
of connectivity. This connection forged of human and universe risks yet another
campy colonization—It’s ours!—but it also marks an ecstatic encounter as humans
become extrusions of, rather than observers on, the universe. As with Burroughs’s
treatment of becoming-gun, Wald’s transformation of the border proceeds when a
certain blockage is blocked—that blockage called “autonomy.”
Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of the “Plane of Transcendence”
and the “Plane of Consistency” help to map this instability—rather than undecid-
ability—of inside and outside. “The Plane of Consistency” maps the capacities for
difference—Kauffman’s persistently rugged landscapes—that enable this qualitatively
different movement from the outside that Deleuze and Guattari characterize as a
movement of immanence. Here:
There is no structure, any more than there is genesis. There are only relations
of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or
at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and particles
of all kinds. . . . Nothing subjectifies, but haecceities form according to com-
positions of nonsubjectified powers or affects. . . . We therefore call it a plane
of Nature, although nature has nothing to do with it, since on this plane
there is no distinction between the natural and the artificial.5

S i m f l e s h , S i m b o n e s
Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of immanence highlights the
relation between the natural and human world as one of “composition,” a diverse
mixture of speeds and matter that refuse the organizational binary of artificial/natural;
the plane of consistency is a massively connected network through which the artificial
and the natural emerge. Rather than an axis that demarcates the world into the nature/
culture or human/inhuman dialectic, the plane of consistency maps the irreducible
particularity (“haecceities”) of that strange mixture of qualitative difference, the world.
As such, the plane of consistency maps more of a “polyverse” than a universe, one
composed of capacities for difference more than unities or things.6
Composed of distributed bundles of difference, the plane of con-
sistency is not simply “our stuff.” Propriety is an artifact not of immanence and con-
sistency, but of transcendence and organization. Thus the subjectless yet individual
space of the plane of consistency is constantly in danger of a sudden nonlinear crash
into organization:
The plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of consis-
tency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the move-
ments of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute
forms and subjects in a dimension of depth.7
It is within this double formation—an encounter with an immanence prior to and
constitutive of subjectivity that is continually and catastrophically stratified by tran-
scendence—that I wish to map the “outside/inside” movement announced by Wald.
For although “stuff,” in all its particularity and alterity, is ultimately put under arrest
on the plane of transcendence via the sign of “our” and its network of propriety and
property practices, Wald’s description serves as more than an occasion for a decon-
struction of the commodification of the world. It offers an encounter with the ecsta-
tic complicity between the individuated forms of “us” and “stuff.” It renders a dynamic
holism that is not an organicism, a massive network of differential connection and
becoming that transforms the Earth into something other than a battleground for
nature/culture. It resounds with “us,” it responds to “stuff.”
(25) If Rat Work, Then Line of Flight
On the contemporary life sciences channel, where biology’s new reagent is informa-
tion, Wald’s glass, which serves as a quasi plane of consistency that takes in the or-
ganic and the artificial, the “universe” and “us,” becomes a screen. Artificial life, the
synthesis of living organisms in software and robotics, marks a potent and uncertain

node in this networked reshuffling of the organic and the inorganic, real and artificial.
By looking to the computer screen as a vantage point from which to construct a “uni-
versal biology”—not merely life as it is, but Langton’s “life as it could be”—artificial
life indexes the seismic rhetorical shifts underway in the contemporary life sciences.8
It also maps the intermittent movement of Life, Nature, and Co. to the playful but
delimitable space of screens, a movement of location that reinscribes the transcen-
dental valence of “life” and “nature” even as our simulation practices shatter, through
an incessant doubling, the priority and sovereignty of vitality and nature. This re-
coronation of life and nature works precisely to the extent that technoscientific prac-
tices occlude their ecologies of possibility, other practices on all sides of the screen.9
But if it is sometimes difficult to tell which side of the screen
technoscientific practices are on, it is equally difficult to extricate artificial life tech-
niques from lay and popular discourses that suffuse them. Networked with more
than other computers, connected to more than disk drives and Web sites, the screen
that so uncertainly conjoins and divides the organic and the inorganic is itself a
mere polyp in the reef of material strategies that makes possible this new distribution
of vitality. While not contesting the claims of artificial life in the name of the natural
or the organic, I do want to introduce a flicker of hesitation into the discourse of
transcendentality that accompanies and often enables artificial life, a site where the
screen becomes a plane of organization and transcendence, hovering over the world
of actuality, defining if not determining our knowledge of “life.” Computer Scientist
and Unabomber target David Gelernter’s notion of the computer screen as “Topsite”
in Mirror Worlds typifies the rhetorical operation that converts the screen into a
plane of transcendence: “Topsight is what comes from a far-overhead vantage point,
from a bird’s eye view that reveals the whole—the big picture; how the parts fit to-
gether.”10 Topsite is the spatial version of technoscientific monotheism, its plane of
transcendence; if only we could achieve that one perspective with which to view the
“whole.” This intense intersection of surveillance and knowledge finds its plausibility
within a world of implosion described by Gelernter as
an event that will happen someday soon: You will look into a computer screen
and see reality. . . . When you switch one on, you turn the world (like an old
sweater) inside out. You stuff the huge multi-institutional ratwork that en-
compasses you into a genie bottle on your desk. You can see over, under and
through it. You can see deeply into it. A bottled institution cannot intimidate,
confound or ignore its members; they dominate it. . . . People will stop looking
at their computer screens and start gazing into them.11

S i m f l e s h , S i m b o n e s
Again, the world becomes “our stuff.” Anticipated as a static space of domination,
the connections of “world” and “us” operate only in one direction. But such a topo-
logical reduction, wherein human beings are somehow exterior to the objects of
their gaze, is clearly impossible: one need not be a Derridean to agree that such a
quest for spatial-temporal closure is not just unlikely, but hilariously and vertiginously
impossible. For obviously, “reality” includes, but is not limited to, our interaction
with it, and Gelernter’s masterful gaze would need to include a small window that
featured the back of his head in front of the screen, and inside that window we
would need another that featured the back of the device that rendered his head, and
so on. This is not simply a philosophical quandary; the networked movement of the
real to the screen has profoundly altered our practices of war, our notions of medicine,
and our theoretical understanding of life, forming a tangled feedback loop with the
object that is allegedly “contained” within the screen: wetwares. Perhaps most cru-
cially, this inside out movement takes place “sometime soon” in an uncertain prac-
tice of anticipation, a rhetorical enterprise I will return to approximately fifty-six
percent of the way through this text. For such an anticipatory gaze is not simply pas-
sive, as in Kauffman’s agonizingly gorgeous waiting game above. Anticipation marks
the complicity of Gelernter’s vision with an unlikely and thoroughly aleatory wel-
come, a hospitality to the future which is not simply masterful but receptive to, so-
licitous of, difference: Welcome to Topsite.
If the timing of such a welcome is blurred into and by an uncer-
tain future, so too is the very location of this inside/out arrival in doubt. “Ratworks”
are composed precisely of connection—exits, entrances, traversal, and flight. Folded
“into” the space of the computer, such ratworks transform the relatively locatable
sovereignty of the box into the distributed connectivity of a network. Such a connec-
tive space tends to cultivate the rugged, contagious networks Kauffman has researched,
ecologies of great sensitivity and tremendous “capacity” for transformation.12
Thus I will argue for the screen otherwise: Conceived as a space
of becoming that suffuses humans as much as it “contains” the world, the computer
screen and its beyond becomes some other topology, an ecstatic multiplex of fluctua-
tion. Neither inside nor outside the computer network or its other, “the world,” this
wetware is the material, corporeal skin of contemporary transformations of power-
knowledge, a material and biological membrane that is contemporary capital and its
work of deterritorialization. As transformations rather than objects, such flickering
assemblages of flesh and money are accessed through what I cited earlier in this text
as itineration or following. As with the ratwork of markets with which they are so

complexly enmeshed, such webs cultivate less mastery than response, and they allow
no “fixed point of view that is external to what is reproduced.”13 “Rather than external
perspectives on a flow, itineration breeds new forms of complicity in which perspective
and identity are the very media of response—they are at stake in the observation.
This complicity emerges partially through the capacity of virtual
technologies—which are neither here nor there—to distribute corporeal practices
across a network. Mathematician and semiotician Brian Rotman has pointed out
that the mouse, as an interfacial familiar, provides us with a metonym for the project
of rendering the body, virtually.14 The mouse is the becoming-virtual of the finger,
the finger’s avatar on the other side of the screen. As such it can be described within
the McLuhanite rhetorics of prosthesis: the mouse is an extension of the finger
“into” electronic space. And yet that extension also troubles the status of the finger,
dislocating it, citationally distributing it both inside and outside of the computer
screen in a becoming-mouse or even animal of the hand.
Another mouse allows us to flesh out an articulation of this ec-
static body. BioMedic Data Systems15 announced the arrival of the Möbius mouse in
a 1992 advertisement for its Electronic Laboratory Animal Monitoring System
(ELAMS™). “We keep lab animals from having an identify complex” could be read
in at least two ways. On the one hand, it announces the practices of precision and
exactitude that compose the contemporary life sciences, practices that are in this in-
stance techniques of surveillance. Thus the ability of ELAMS™ to prevent “an iden-
tity complex” testifies to the massive disciplining of the mouse that goes on in the
lab: ELAMS™ allows the user to know where and how any particular mouse is,
“who” it is, in some sense. There will be no doubt about who this mouse is; the
ELAMS™ allows the mouse to become code and yet remain distinguishable—genet-
ically identical, the “mouse of tomorrow” still needs an identity if it is to play its cru-
cial role in knowledge production.
It can link any animal to any computer database, allowing you to individualize
your animal using your study number. You can even characterize them with
clinical observation codes . . . Simply put, it replaces the complexities and in-
accuracies of toe clipping, ear tagging and tattooing with a foolproof, fast
and economical method of positive identification.16
Thus the ELAMS™ replaces the practices of the body—surveillance tactics of the toe,
ear, and skin—with the operations of coding. The mouse as an object of study is
“characterize(d),” transformed into a character, a diagram, an inscription. As such, our

S i m f l e s h , S i m b o n e s
mouse exemplifies N. Katherine Hayles’s description of the posthuman as the infor-
matic pattern of the mouse becomes more interesting than its material instantiation.17
And yet the visuals of the BioMedic ad provoke another response.
The mouse/computer relation is rendered as a deterritorialization, a movement that
traverses both sides of the screen, beginning and ending everywhere and nowhere.
More than a clean deletion or replacement of the body, the screen marks a vertiginous
blur of recursion—the becoming code of the mouse and its subsequent territorial-
ization onto identity and deterritorialization “into” citable and thus virtual codes. As
such it is not pure code (no implosion of the mouse and code is complete) but is in-
stead a bramble of feedback between a deterritorialization that allows for a reception
of the mouse at a distance—the telecommunicative aspects of the BioMedic identity
chip, the emergence of the genetically identical “mouse of tomorrow”—and the
territorialization of the mouse into a cluster of knowledge that constrains and renders
visible the massively engineered critter as a more intensely scientific object. The
mouse body thus rendered yields a complex, an assemblage of corporeality and virtu-
ality that traverses both and yet is nowhere in particular, yielding information that is
itself captured into formats and frameworks of knowledge production. The ad instan-
tiates a wetware over time, frozen into a single frame—on both sides of the screen at
once, the mouse images a spatial and material organization of the machine/body rela-
tion as a distribution, an experimental rendering of the unplaceable chaos of actual-
ization that is the production of scientific knowledge and its generation of value.
This sense of the incessant and intense relations that compose
the mouse as a scientific object disturbs the easy transcendental position of the human
(in this case, the reader) placed in front the screen. For if the mouse traverses both
“sides” of the screen, dynamically embodies a Möbius strip of an interface, then
humans get dislocated from Topsite, a simple looking down on the mouse, and im-
plicated in the practice of becoming code, wetwares enmeshed with the ubiquitous
processes of encoding—the capture of environments by regimes of signs. These
codings are then captured by the production of knowledges that sculpt and anticipate
the very future of homo sapiens and biological systems in general, a future itself es-
sentially unpredictable and by definition not yet actualized or instantiated.
It is clear that the sense of complicity such a reading fosters is it-
self disciplined out of most contemporary representations of technoscience; techno-
science is, among other events, an autonomy machine that preserves its boundaries.
The transcendental position of the scientist is constantly reinscribed in a retroactive
production of a recursive declaration: “Identification is who we are,” announces

BioMedic Data Systems, as if that were an answer.18 Hence my intervention here:
Keeping the plane of consistency connective, in flight, I want to highlight the rhetor-
ical practices that enable transcendence and subjectivity to sprout from the corpo-
real and rhetorical mixture that makes up the recursively Möbius-like phenotype
and ribotype of alife. In response to such moves I offer precisely a response, a rhetor-
ical encounter of the lab as well as the living room: Get into the Sim.
(29) x = year
(30) For x = 1953, Next X
(31) x = x + 1
(35) If x = 1987, then 40
(40) Print “Greetings Electronic Biologist!”
To exemplify the ways that the “gene” has been figured within the new complicities
of “life” and “information,” “nature” and “culture,” I double click first on a software
avatar called SimLife: The Genetic Playground. SimLife, an old software package avail-
able for both PC and Macintosh platforms, provides us with an artifact and a toy
that we can treat as a diagram of the complex and interactive inscriptions that suffuse
the “gene” in popular and scientific culture. Released by the Maxis Corporation in
1992, SimLife is an artificial life program, a “game, a toy and an experimental tool to
learn about life, real and artificial.” The package consists of a registration card (cited
above), a manual, a lab book for recording your SimLife experiments, and a couple
of disks that go into the computer. It’s no longer supported or marketed by Maxis,
but I bought it at a garage sale, doing my bit for biodiversity.
This extraordinary program offers users the ability to be a virtual
genetic engineer, as SimLife provides an environment for the cultivation, nourishment
and breeding of artificial organisms, something akin to cybernetic sea monkeys.
Here I will offer a brief analysis of both the documentation and the interactions
available to the electronic biologist, the one who has realized along with Harvard
molecular biologist Walter Gilbert that biology’s new reagent is information.19
Already, the hard copy documentation bundled with SimLife an-
nounces recipes for becoming: Rhino-headed tigers, ostrich giraffes, and a toucan
lizard crowd the environment of the cover, eyeballing the reader in a reversal of the
gaze to come, a gaming gaze that will look into the screen of a computer and not at
it. With the cover, SimLife has already begun its tutorial: look into our chimerical

S i m f l e s h , S i m b o n e s
eyes. SimLife, after all, is itself a chimerical beast—part toy, part game, part tool, it
exists at that node where the practices of science and the practices of culture collide.
The SimLife manual, as well as the program, goes to great lengths
to resist the appellation of mere game:
SimLife isn’t exactly a game—it’s what we call a Software Toy. Toys, by defi-
nition, are more flexible and open-ended than games. . . . In SimLife, the “toy”
is a biology laboratory in a computer.20
While little may be seen to be at stake here in a genre distinction—what matter if
we are dealing here with a toy, a game, or a weapon?—the emergence of simulations
as “flexible” forms of inter-tainment and inquiry marks not only the blurring of dis-
tinction between lab and living room and the subsequent distribution of knowledge
production (e.g. Linux); it also highlights the fundamentally experimental and itiner-
ative character of the SimLife experience. As unpredictable and contingent instanti-
ations of simple rules, SimLife creatures promise to surprise the attentive and caring
electronic biologist. This promise of affect—“What? The Moof’s have died off?!”—
indexes the ways in which SimLife creatures emerge out of an affective as well as sil-
icon substrate even as the laboratory follows our mouse into the computer. That is,
as I argued in the previous episode of alife analysis, the open-ended character of alife
creatures—their exposure to the difference of the future—also links them affectively
to those humans who would play with them. It is in this sense that the becoming
code of vitality selects for, and is grafted to, the responses of its human and machine
interactors: There are affective protocols as constitutive of SimLife as those of
MS-DOS, Windows, and Macintosh, the operating systems with which they must
be run. These affective components of computational environments can be variable—
frustration, surprise, and especially laughter emerges—but in all cases such response
is an element of the interface rather than its simple result. Response, in the case of
SimLife, is incorporated into the ecology to the extent that it operates as a vector of
sexual selection, a provocation into response: More Moofs, please.21
As I argued earlier, this response is most easily understood in
terms of the tactics of Darwinian sexual selection, where the “antics” of a male bird
and his plumage seductively renders female reproductive agency through intense inter-
action. In our instance though, one can be even more precise: What is being “repro-
duced” here are not simply creatures but affective states whose effects are contagious
enough to result in a very specific itinerary: that of the mouse. Brian Rotman has pro-
duced what he calls “mousegrams,” the visualization of those highly choreographed

but immensely contingent movements of computer input devices at play in, with,
the interface. This responsiveness is not merely the dance of the Moof for its human
observer—with a click, wetwares too join the tangle.
(45) MOUSE EVENT: Double Click, Watsonia
What is it that SimLife simulates? How does it inter-tain? Click Click to find out, on
the SimLife world I will call “Watsonia” in honor of James Watson’s wonderfully
SimLife ethos noted earlier: “In order to know what life is, we must know how
genes act.”
You have already learned two of the technologies of the gene asso-
ciated with SimLife: look into the computer, and when in doubt, double click. Given
the constraints of the textual realm I am operating in here, I can only simulate the
click, but you’ll get the picture. Follow along as I narrate a sample world creation in
SimLife.
After entering the SimLife environment through a strangely ef-
fective and yet contradictory performative, as I really do press down the following
keys—SIM—we begin the first part of the game/simulation: a genesis fantasy. No
longer the province of God’s finger, genesis has been democratized to include anyone
with a mouse. Clicking on “experimental,” we get to choose our own creatures, control
the creation of our own world, set its climate, watch it run from that space Gelernter
refers to as “Topsite.” SimLife is a transcendental toy; it allows the look into the
computer screen to be a look down, as the first sight of the SimLife screen is a sur-
veillance shot; lest we forget that SimLife was developed with the help of Los Alamos
and its new-age complexity franchise, the Santa Fe Institute, we can see the military
gaze built right into our game/toy/tool. Looking down and around our world, we
can take it all in, without any night-vision goggles.
I have already done some creation work, and the first gaze of
Watsonia features the frenzied movement of crawling sea urchins, sprouting sea let-
tuce, some annoying, chimerical dogs called Moofs, and my personal favorites, those
persistent trilobites. While the fantasies of control this game/tool/toy makes possible
are obvious—fantasies that Watsonia might very well share with Watson—a perhaps
less obvious effect of SimLife is that other fantastic operation: being-out-of-control.
With the complex interactions of climate, speciation and mutagens, even the advanced
SimLife player/researcher/creature will quickly get that exhilarating, positive feeling
of a lack of control; the sea lettuce has mutated to swim, the trilobites have learned
to fly, and there are no male Moofs left. How did that happen? When in doubt, double
click.

S i m f l e s h , S i m b o n e s
Click on History, and you’ll find a fine map of SimHistory. His-
tory here is a list, a “running record of all events in the world.” No background ma-
trix, no narrative, the world of Watsonia is chronicled as a series of discrete, and often
catastrophic, events. Interactions take place in the background; despite SimLife’s
goal that the user “understand that the real world with its millions of species with
their combined billions of genes are interrelated and carefully balanced in the food
chain and the web of link” or perhaps because of it, History is a list of extinctions,
sproutings, and mutations. There is no web of relations connecting these events.
The SimNarrative emerges through the clicking, reading, fluctuating wetware of the
user.
History’s status as a sequence of discrete, static events instantiates
the view of life expounded by Watson above: Life exists in the gene, genes are the
actors of life, and bodies mere supplements or extensions of the miraculous software
called DNA. Indeed, in SimLife, bodies are transparent: If you want to see the genome
of a SimLife creature, then click on it with the double helix, and a window zooms
out to exhibit the control panel/genome that determines the characteristics of any
organism. And yet, according to the SimLife manual, this is not what these organisms
really look like:
As you play SimLife, the different plants and animals will visually appear in a
few different ways. None of these ways truly and accurately shows the way
these organisms look. These electronic organisms exist as ones and zeros—
energy states in transistor switches in the memory chips of your computer.
Assuming that most of the beings that play SimLife are human, and that
none of the humans we know can see energy states in transistor switches, we
figured we’d better find some way to visually present SimLife-forms in a way
that humans can see and understand.22
This nod toward visual representation—an ornamental represen-
tation oriented less to survival than to seduction and replication—points to the im-
portance of Barbieri’s claims concerning ribotype and to the rhetorical functions of
such ribotype, rhetorics that allow the unprecedented in silico organisms of SimLife
to be seen and “understood.”
Thus the implosion between “real” organisms and “SimLife” or-
ganisms is complete, leading to a reversal; no longer what we see on the computer
screen, SimLife creatures now dwell inside the computer, beyond the screen. And yet
these ones and zeros are both the “organisms” and their “genes”; as in a certain ver-
sion of molecular biology, organisms are nothing but (electronic) DNA. In SimLife,

what is “real” about an organism are its genes, code that dwells in the computer.
Simlife “bodies” are energy states about to fluctuate. Whereas the chimerical cover
and genre of SimLife announce strange mixtures of “phenotypes,” the location of the
“real” appearance of SimLife creatures as inside the computer—You stuff the huge
multi-institutional ratwork that encompasses you into a genie bottle on your desk—maps
out the overtaking of phenotype by genotype that has characterized the ascent of ge-
nomics. The pixels of SimLife become blurred reflections of the real SimLife organ-
isms, organisms that dwell not on the screen but in it, through a glass darkly.
While we may still press our noses up against the screen, looking
in vain for the true and accurate picture of the real, we nonetheless have access:
clicking on the mouse gives us an avatar, a simulated body of a creature under the
purview of “Charles Darwin (only in his dreams),”23 one of the suggested subject
positions for the SimLife user. What it gives us access to is another question, one I
can only speculate on, since I have not yet played SimLife long enough. It plugs us
into the new truth of bodies as extensions of our genetic software, our new under-
standing of “what life is.” As model rocketry in the heyday of NASA enabled many
to participate in that “giant step for mankind,”—what William S. Burroughs has
called getting “the whole show out of the barnyard and into Space”24—electronic
biology plugs us into, makes us virtual witnesses of, genomics. It connects us to the
circuits of culture and technoscience that bring biotechnology to Wall Street, Wash-
ington, and finally, our SimLiving rooms.
Of course, it is the status of this circuit that I want to question.
Whereas “life” is ascribed to the autonomous and isolated little bits of energy occupy-
ing the computer, I want to highlight the importance of what I above characterized
as the ribotype in the constitution of SimLife. For it is with rhetorical operations
that the vitality of SimLife organisms is located on the screen, indeed located at all.
While philosophers may grapple with the metaphysical question—Is alife really alive,
or not?—I want to highlight the possibility conditions that allow this to be posited
as a question at all. For what makes SimLife “lively”?
I have thus far focused on the interactions between SimLife and
its users for good reason: against the grain of the claim that alife creatures “them-
selves” enjoy vitality, I want to suggest that the screen that orients alife is on a plane of
immanence, a massive assemblage of machines, users, and rhetorics that semiotically
and materially distribute the “vitality effect.” The relation between the user and the
Simlife organisms is more one of ongoing, affective interaction than demiurgical
creation, a theological subject position that SimLife, as well as alife in general, con-
stantly alludes to.25 And this ongoing interaction produces effects on the user as well

S i m f l e s h , S i m b o n e s
as the SimLife organisms. Karl Sigmund, writing in Games of Life: Explorations in
Ecology, Evolution, and Behaviour, remembers the need that Conway’s game of Life—an
early precursor to contemporary alife—had for human wetware:
In the early 1970s, at a time when computer viruses were not yet an all too
common plague, there was another type of epidemic causing alarm among
computer owners. It [Life] used the human brain as intermediate host.26
While the status of Sigmund’s description here is uncertain—is he serious?—the recog-
nition of the material substrate necessary for Life to propagate is well put. Neither
masterful creator nor objective observer, the player of Life was an element in the alife
ecology. This ecology was also an ecology of bodies, the affects and pleasures that
enabled the propagation of Life.
And what, we might ask, produced these effects? Whence came
the pleasures of Life? Some, no doubt, were of a purely cognitive kind, but the
emergence of complexity from the simple patterns on a grid is, for some, akin to the
sublime. Christopher Langton, reporting on his close encounter with silicon, this
time to journalist Steven Levy:
The computer was running a long Life configuration, and Langton hadn’t
been monitoring it closely. Yet suddenly he felt a strong presence in the
room. Something was there. He looked up, and the computer monitor showed
an interesting configuration he hadn’t previously encountered. “I crossed a
threshold then,” he recalls, “it was the first hint that there was a distinction
between hardware and the behavior it would support . . . You had the feeling
there was really something very deep here in this little artificial universe
and its evolution through time.”27
The depth that Langton encounters here, a depth associated if not identical to the
vitality of the Life configuration, is beyond the screen. It is enabled by the simultane-
ous immersion in the world of Life and its disavowal, “Langton had not been moni-
toring it closely.” I have written elsewhere of the way in which the autonomy and vi-
tality of the alife creature is enabled by the structural blindness of this glance away:
The power and vitality associated with the alife creature is directly related to its au-
tonomy, and its autonomy occurs through the blockage of the machines, bodies, de-
sires, and softwares that foster it. Hence, “life” is contained “in” this artificial universe,
not in the (natural?) (uni?) universe. Just as identity is associated with an invisibility
of the institutions and communities that enable it, so too does vitality seem to emerge
only through the invisibility of its networks.

And yet, another response is also available here: Langton was
looking at the alife body. That is, what Langton was looking at in the glance away
was not nothing; it was the “external,” material network of practices that enabled the
uncanny and catastrophic movement on the screen: the emergence of a “distinction.”
Just as the orchid images the wasp, so too do SimLife creatures
image all too human desire, the desire for transcendental subjectivity of choice and
purity of descendence. Such affective states are reproduced with each click of the
mouse—Moofs help to reproduce the experience of transcendence as well as them-
selves. But the corporeal players of SimLife are also complicit in the “reproduction”
of Simlife; the distribution of Simlife creatures, the deployment and articulation of
their vitality, relies on the external wetware of human brains, their rhetorical soft-
wares, their bodies and machines, just as the orchid is bound up with the wasp.
Thus, Life, and by extension SimLife, is not a one-person game. Karl Sigmund claims
that
Life is not a two-person game like chess or checkers; neither is it a one-person
game like patience or solitaire. It is a no-person game. One computer suffices.
Even that is not strictly required, in fact, but it helps to follow the game.
The role of human participants is reduced to that of onlookers. Apart from
watching the game, one has just to decide from which position to start. All
the rest proceeds by itself.28
Here I want to agree with Sigmund that Life, and all alife games, are “no-person”
games. No person or subject reigns over SimLife creatures. They nonetheless do
not proceed autonomously, by themselves. Alife works off of a distributed corporeal-
ity; the phenotype of the SimLife code, its necessary transduction apparatus as well
as what it produces, includes the material, affective, and rhetorical ecologies within
which they live. It relies on a Möbius body, one both within and without the screen,
one at once inside the computer platform and outside it.
Thus as virtual witnesses to genomics, we form a rhizome with
it. In this light, the transcendental discourse of “Topsite” that seems to cling to the
space of the computer screen can be seen to be an effect of the screen among others,
and not its cause. An instance of transspecies (indeed, transphylum) sexual selection,
alife seduces with the allure of transcendence, so much silicon pheromone to tradi-
tional forms of vision and rationality. Yet in the midst of seduction, bodies become
fluid and unpredictable: more than merely enacting the transcendental desire of the
player, SimLife provokes a sense of complicity with a world beyond and around and
of the screen, an exhilarating feeling of “depth,” the sublimity of the chaotic multi-

S i m f l e s h , S i m b o n e s
plicity at play even in the simple SimLife world. The player becomes Moof, becomes
trilobite, becomes plant, in the Simlife ecology, producing radically destratifying
effects on the subjectivity of the user. Indeed, in some ways SimLife is a game of and
about becoming, as the SimLife organism—including its interactive phenotype, the
alife body of the user and his networks—only appears as recursive blur. The very
materiality of the screen, the appearance of the SimLife organisms, seems to pulse. The
creatures mutate, the user interacts, and nothing like a simple subjectivity reigns.29
But the plane of immanence, where moof, human, and silicon
are all on the menu, abruptly crashes into transcendence, for genomics is not merely
a technoscientific practice, it is a subjectivity machine. The constant choosing—as
with Darwin’s treatment of sexual selection, SimLife is also game of and about
choice—reinscribes the difference humanity makes, collapsing and stalling the net-
work into a node on the screen. The return from the glance away ends at the screen,
a paradoxical “looking up” at Topsite, locating and rendering discrete the SimLife
organism, transforming the user from a complicit element in an ecology to a choos-
ing, viewing subject, an “onlooker,” a witness of and not an ecstatic participant in the
alife phenotype.
One final example helps make this virtual witnessing point. In
the SimLife tutorial, the first action the user is directed to take in the SimLife world is
to “draw your name in seeds.” How does one “draw” a name? If this interaction oper-
ates as a vector of sexual selection, what desire does drawing a name in seeds solicit?
As a literal act of insemination, SimLife’s tutorial solicits the most
obvious and allegedly biological vector of male desire: the desire to disperse ones
“own” genetic information and therefore diversify, as the sociobiologists put it, a ge-
netic profile.30 And indeed, by “drawing” a name in seeds, one in fact writes oneself
into a new phylum. With such a script, the user does indeed diversify their portfolio,
expanding their reproduction franchise into the domain of silicon. No longer confined
to the operation of human sexual reproduction, SimLife users now add a novel new
ecology for their (foolish) hopes of immortality. Indeed, this ecology forms the sub-
strate for that other wetware response to postvital living, uploading, a practice I will
return to later in this text.
And yet one must ask the obvious and yet oft overlooked question:
How, exactly, does one inseminate a machine? Only through a radical interaction and
complicity—a submission to silicon—is the desire for insemination enacted. Allow-
ing oneself to be solicited by a screen entails a seduction in which humans interact
with, rather than act on, an entire bramble of technological infrastructure. Watching
the seeds sprout, grow and die in something approaching the pattern of your name

plays out the drama implicit in much of genomics. The drawing—an aesthetic ren-
dering—of the signature, your signature, gives the effect of individual, human dif-
ference and control. You, after all, dominate that genie bottle on your desk, you
populate it, design it. As the seeds sprout and plants grow and die on your simworld,
“your” signature changes—bits fall out of a scrawled letter here and there, until be-
coming some other, barely legible, “word,” then blending in with the messy back-
ground and frenzied movement of SimLife until yielding an unpredictable and trans-
human growth. Hence the double gesture of transcendence and immanence: the
user gets to inscribe and be overtaken by the genetic playground, SimLife. So too
with the culture of genomics: the race to locate the genetic basis of everything simul-
taneous places control in the hands of “us” (doctors, biologists) even while it high-
lights our thoroughly masochistic submission to the inscriptions on our genes. That
we might be infinitely complicit and entangled with our genes—neither masters
nor victims, neither choosers nor chosen—evaporates under the spell of subjectivity,
forestalling a more-than-genetic transformation, arresting the technological ensemble
that could be a playground for becoming other than we are. Our challenge, as readers,
writers, and players and not witnesses, is to hack this spell of transcendence with
techniques of ecstasy.

T H R E E

Exactly what business are cryonicists in?
CryoNet online discussion group,
message 1734
IF the contemporary hegemonic life sciences, with their incessant and productive
substitution of DNA softwares for corporeal organisms, trouble our traditional con-
ceptions of the organic body, then cryonics—the organized freezing of human bodies
or heads in preparation for their revival—would seem to deploy a less elusive corpo-
reality. A body is frozen, preserved, encapsulated against the entropic operations of
time. Sealed off, stopped, suspended, nothing would seem so clearly isolated and
autonomous as the cryonic body. Mute, it would seem outside the discursive net-
works that enable artificial life. Frozen, its very status would seem to forbid its con-
nection to the intensities and affects which suffuse the artificial life phenotype and
ribotype. In this sense, the cryonic corpse could be seen to be a memorial devoted to
a nineteenth-century corporeality, a body of autonomy and will that has been put
under a temporary, if uncertain, arrest.
Yet the cryonic corpse is a body of frenzy, an incessant smearing
of the body over time. Neither alive nor dead, cryonic flesh organizes a massive dis-
course of maintenance and repair; even in its death, the body is becoming. Rather
Disciplined by the Future:
The Promising Bodies of Cryonics

than simply ensuring the autonomy of a willing and paying subject through time, a
great affirmation of the power of the Same, the cryonic body is saturated with differ-
ence. Reliant on a whole swarm of Others for its maintenance and its promise of re-
vival, the cryonic body is not “technically” or accidentally immersed in a hospitality
pool, along with its liquid nitrogen. Rather, in its very formulation and enactment,
the promised body of cryonics is constitutively enthralled to the future.
In my investigation of the cryonic body that follows, I will attempt
to highlight the transcendental production of an autonomous cryonic subject out of
the tangled ecology that is the cryonic body, a discipline beyond living that ensures
the constant identity of body and subject. At the same time, I hope to highlight the
intensities produced in this economy of hospitality, intensities that fuel the futures
market in bodies called cryonics.
Opening Up the Cryonic Body
An autopsy opens the body, displays the network of forces that produce the apparently
unified organism, disturbing the claim that the body is one. The flow of blood, the
elaborate network of organs, testify to the contingent production of life. Foucault, in
The Birth of the Clinic, explicated the discursive possibility conditions for this “display.”
Not merely the scalpel cuts open the medical body; rhetorical formulations, silent
and otherwise, made it possible for the opened body to “speak.” If the body were to
speak out of its silence, it had to be composed, patterned. It had to be ordered.
In that sense, then, an opening in or of the body relies funda-
mentally on performativity, an utterance or discourse that is itself an action, such as
an order. That action, as J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler have force-
fully and differentially argued, cannot itself be rendered, articulated. It is a force that
is itself to remain continually camouflaged as a condition of its production or emer-
gence. In the catastrophe of an utterance, there suddenly emerges a command.
For cryonics, this is true from the beginning: “DO NOT AUTOPSY
OR EMBALM!!” (CryoNet, message 1537).1 This command—an action and a state-
ment—has been inscribed on and in the refrigerator of a cryonics subscriber. It is
not an incidental condition of the production of the cryonic body; it is an initial con-
dition, the condition that must be true for cryonics to hold any promise. As a set of
instructions that, its authors argue, must accompany the cryonic body, these com-
mands and other recipes, rhetorical algorithms, have been characterized as a “vial of
life” one ought to keep in the refrigerator.2 The “vial of life” program was originally
bundled with a set of medical instructions. Cryonics patients—and they must be pa-

D i s c i p l i n e d b y t h e F u t u r e
tient—include cryonic directions within these medical recipes, these bits of exteri-
ority that order a frozen, and not an opened, body.
Cryonic Softwares
Besides this stark example, though—the command that installs, even bootstraps,
the cryonic body—there is a network of other rhetorical softwares that fuel the on-
going production of a cryonic corpse, a set of rhetorical, disciplinary operations that
Deleuze and Guattari have characterized as “order words.”3 These rhetorics take the
form of a promising machine or organization. Cryonics is a promise, a promise to
revive that is itself continually at risk, in exposure. Something other than the present,
something yet to come, insures the cryonic body.4 Cryonics cannot stand to be alone;
it is itself networked with something other, even if that other be nothing but futurity.
Productive, in frenzied motion, the frozen body does not stand still. It moves along
a constant reinscription of the promise, a constant promise to promise. It is in part
the promise of the machine:
If someone was to place a regular amount each month into savings, and
when sufficient funds were available buy some conservative high technology
stocks, or maybe a mutual fund specializing in technology, then if growth
does not occur this is because technology has failed in some way, and this
same failure will defeat cryonics as well. Therefore the system is self-fulfilling:
No technology growth � no cryonics, and you have no funds. High tech-
nology growth � rising funds and successful cryonics, which you can afford.
(CryoNet, message 4856)
This statement—sampled from an online cryonic discussion
group, CryoNet—highlights the way in which the promise of cryonics is intimate
with, if not identical to, the promise of a certain set of technologies, mostly nano-
technology. But it also indexes the way in which cryonics is dependent upon a mar-
keting of the future, or at least a futures market. If high technology stocks are, at
least in part, promises to deliver a set of knowledges and techniques in the future,
then cryonics is a futures market in bodies.5 “One living body to be delivered at
some incalculable date.” But it is not merely any living body to be delivered or
named later. It is a living body coexistent with the subjectivity of the cryonics sub-
scriber; typically this return of the subject, the fulfillment of the promise of cryonics,
is thematized as the patient who “awakens.” In Cryonics: Reaching for Tomorrow, a
publication put out by the Alcor corporation, one of the largest cryonics organizations,

the speculative scenario for recovery is a science fiction story emphasizing the iden-
tity of the client. After a technical description of the (nanotechnological) means of
revival that is voiced in the third person, the patient reports as the one who says “I”
repeatedly:
I awoke to a gentle touch on my arm. I opened my eyes and saw my friend
Ken Phelan. He was wearing a white lab coat. I looked around me and saw
that I was in a hospital room.6
Unlike Kafka’s Joseph K. of The Trial,7 who awakens to find that he has become
something other, a criminal whose crimes are unknown to him, the cryonics patient
is promised a self that will persist even through the sudden avalanche of identity
called “awakening.” I am still I. Friends and family have become healthier, wealthier,
but not different. Subjectivity persists in death in a manner impossible in life; if iden-
tity is a set of becomings, it is only in becoming-frozen that becoming itself is frozen.
The Other Side of the Freezer
Strangely, this promise of cryonics is also the promise of hospitality, a promise which
for philosopher Emmanuel Levinas is fundamentally ethical, as it involves the
subject with an inarticulable other.8 Posting the simple but impossible question—
What should be done?—the Alcor corporation, one of the largest extant organizations
that practice cryonics, thematizes this fundamental alterity as the “relative problem”:
With twenty-seven patients in suspension, Alcor has had quite a lot of expe-
rience dealing with relatives of suspension patients. Even with friendly, co-
operative relatives there can be many problems. One of the biggest problems
that most people don’t consider is that even friendly relatives (on average)
don’t know much about cryonics. They don’t understand what the procedures
include, what kinds of cooperation we need from hospital, nursing home, or
family, and they don’t understand why we hang around the patient for several
days, asking nosy questions about the patient’s blood pressure, temperature,
enzyme levels, etc. We need this information to estimate when the patient
might deanimate, so we 1) don’t waste time and money by getting to the pa-
tient’s side days early, and 2) so we can be prepared and ready to act right
away when the physician (or nurse, in some cases) pronounces death. This
prediction can be remarkably difficult in the best of circumstances. (CryoNet,
message 2203.1)
Thus even as cryonicists demand to “take control of their lives” and to “rage against
death,” they are in a position of exposure; contingency could intervene at any

D i s c i p l i n e d b y t h e F u t u r e
moment. The technical preparation is constantly implicated in the understanding of
an other, others for whom the act of gathering “information” becomes an act of
intervention.
“On this side of the freezer,” what cryonics pioneer Robert
Ettinger calls his life so far,9 the problem of the other is primarily figured as a prob-
lem of information. As such, the “relative problem” foregrounds cryonics’ reliance
on a notion of human interaction that is founded primarily on an information theo-
retic paradigm of communication: Any resistance to cryonics, and any inhospitable
response to the hospitality machine of cryonics, is regarded as a lack of knowledge,
not an excess of difference. We will return to this notion of cryonics’ debt to the
rhetorics and concepts of information, but for now I just want to mark the inability
of cryonics to think the perhaps impossible-to-codify difference that people other
than cryonicists are. This inability is not merely a side effect of cryonics; it enables
it, in so far as the very project of archiving bodies and subjects relies upon the possi-
bility of stabilizing information over time. And, as we shall see, it is precisely differ-
ence and its inarticulability that threatens the stability of information.
The “relative problem” also highlights the fact that the cryonic
body is not simply a dead body: any cryonic subjectivity is always already becoming-
frozen. She has entered into a relation with a future, a cryonics organization, and a
massive realm of incalculable contingency that must be continually managed, even
disciplined. Hence the amulet worn around the neck of the cryonic subscriber is a
node in a massive network of practices: helicopters for body transport, the promised
goodwill of relatives, the future itself, all spiral out from a necklace.
These camouflaged—not hidden—background conditions or
contingencies compose what Deleuze and Guattari, after Henri Bergson, render as
the “virtual.” Thus one response to the search engine query this segment begins
with—“What business are cryonicists in?”—is: the virtual body. This is not simply the
future body and subject that will reappear at the vanishing point of the future; it is
the set of rhetorical softwares that enable the production and fantasmatic actualiza-
tion of a futural subject at the site of the body’s smooth space of inarticulation, its
future of static. Deleuze and Guattari note that these “incorporeal” articulations are
nonetheless networked with corporeality:
Incorporeal attributes apply to bodies and only to bodies. . . . Their purpose
is not to describe or represent bodies: bodies already have proper qualities,
actions and passions, souls, in short forms which are themselves bodies. Rep-
resentations are bodies too! . . . We cannot even say that the body or state of

things is the “referent” of the sign. In expressing the noncorporeal attribute,
and by that token attributing it to the body, one is not representing or refer-
ring but intervening in a way; it is a speech act.10
It is precisely this notion of “intervening” that I want to highlight here; the cryonic
body is not autonomous. Alive or dead, it is on the line, connected to the rhetorical,
material practices of “information” collection and dissemination that make up the
cryonics community. While subjectivity may be enabled only via an alterity, which
itself is inarticulable, this is particularly obvious with cryonic subjectivity. The pro-
duction of a cryonic subject—alive, dead, or in the uncanny space of suspension—is
possible only on the basis of a Möbius body, a body both within and without the cap-
sule of liquid nitrogen, inside and outside of time. Here the cryonic body exempli-
fies Levinas’s observations about subjectivity: “Subjectivity realizes these impossible
exigencies—the astonishing feat of containing more than it is possible to contain.”11
The cryonic subject, alive or dead, thus “contains” more than itself; as a body with
an ongoing subjectivity, the cryonic body is oddly shaped, as it contains its future. It
depends on the boundless need for an ongoing promise, a promise to preserve the
body, name, and project of the cryonic subject.
Thus, for example, the cryonic subject can actually own in the
future, containing assets in more than the present, as in this example taken from a
Usenet Frequently Asked Question list (FAQ) for cryonics.
How can I pay for my own revival and rehabilitation, and keep some of my
financial assets after revival?
The Reanimation Foundation is set up to enable you to “take it with you”
and provide financial support for your reanimation, reeducation, and reentry.
It is based in Liechtenstein, which does not have a Rule Against Perpetuities,
and thus allows financial assets to be owned by a person long after the person
is declared legally dead.12
What this transaction alludes to is the instantiation of a financial subject on the
other side of the freezer. Installed in the present, this is an annuity of anticipation, a
prolepsis of capital. But in the logic of capital—and cryonics is a body of capital, a
chunk of capital’s body—assets, even futural ones, must be offset by obligations, an
obligation not just to the other, but an obligation to capital, a logic of capital that
contains more than the present. In the futures market of bodies called cryonics, the
immortality of capital itself is at stake in a futures market of markets. More than the

D i s c i p l i n e d b y t h e F u t u r e
body must survive its long hiatus, more than the goodwill and solvency of the cryonics
corporation is at stake; capital itself must persist.
The cryonic subject also owns the secret of her subjectivity; ac-
cording to the FAQ, she owns her own secrecy:
Is Walt Disney frozen?
No. There was a time when all of the cryonics organizations would tell you
this. Since then Alcor (possibly among others) has realized that if they admit
when an individual is not frozen, then it is possible to infer by elimination
who is frozen, which they have in many cases agreed to keep secret. Thus
Alcor will no longer say anything informative about whether Disney was
frozen. Nevertheless, Disney is not frozen.13
Even in death, fame does its work, opening graves with rumor and gossip. One can
only guess at the status of this response, mired as it is in a rhetorical recursion without
end. The contradictory nature of this response—we won’t say, we will say, in the say-
ing we are not saying, in the not saying we are saying—rhetorically mimes the “sus-
pension” of cryonics. The status of the cryonic subject is indefinitely deferred, as Alcor
preserves the possibility of the cryonic subject precisely through a production of
rhetorical undecidability.14
This undecidability, useful though it is in fostering the cryonic
subject’s ownership of her secrets, haunts any ownership of the body. Alcor president
Steven Bridge details the difficulty of “owning” a body of the future here:
Decide who owns your body. If your spouse owns your body, then you’ll
have to settle for no cryonics. If you own your body, then do cryonics and
try to make your spouse deal with the resulting negative emotions instead of
you. If you and your spouse have shared ownership of your body, then the
two of you will have interminable arguments about it; I therefore disrecom-
mend this option. “you own your own body” is legally impossible after you
are declared legally dead; you can’t own anything. Actually, the laws of the
various states determine who owns your body—or at least who has the au-
thority to dispose of it. For you to change that authority, you have to do some-
thing active. This appears to be solved by the Anatomical Donation to Alcor.
Persuading your spouse that this solves the problem is an entirely different
story, of course. A hostile relative or spouse can effectively prevent your sus-
pension or delay it for a very long time by simply not informing Alcor that
you are dead or dying. Of course, if they don’t even know you are signed up,

they won’t call Alcor either. We don’t have a radio-powered heart monitor
attached to those Alcor tags, folks. (CryoNet, message 2203.1)
What’s remarkable about this response—among other things—is that Bridge high-
lights not simply the difficulty of owning a future body, but the problematic nature
of the speech act associated with it. “Interminable arguments”—such as those de-
ployed by Alcor in the production of Disney’s “secret”—threaten the algorithmic
production of a cryonic body and subject. The body—coded as a “donation” of organs
to Alcor—nonetheless resists any complete coding, any final rhetorical and linguistic
management of contingency. “Persuading” the other entails something other than
the transfer of information or its legal inscription: it is a mobilization of rhetorical
force that itself is beyond, before, or in excess of the code; it is “an entirely different
story,” a story of difference.
This massive debt to alterity would seem to threaten the cryonic
project of personal, subjective immortality. For the promise of revival, what cryonicist
Robert Ettinger has dubbed the “prospect of immortality,” does not resound with
the immortality of the community; it sounds the note of identity: “me me me me.” It
does not concern or promise the arrest of time, the erasure of the vanishing point,
for the community—time will march on, difference will happen. It’s just that every-
body will live forever, everybody with the commitment to cryonics. This is a crucial
element in the narratives that thematize cryonics as time travel: history “moves on”
with astonishing speed, in contrast to the mute indifference of cryonic subjects.
Becoming Code
How is this threat—the tension between the absolute difference of historical, tech-
nological change and the identity of the cryonic subject that is enabled with it—
managed? A return to Bridge’s discussion of the “ownership” of the body provides us
with one answer: “Decide who owns your body.” This decision—its possibility bound
up with the rhetorical formulation that one “has” a body rather than “is” one—
indexes the way in which the commitment to cryonics is also a commitment to the
notion of the body as code. For the “decision” to own one’s body, whatever the
rhetorical and agonistic trajectory that leads up to it, relies on its inscription into a
code, a legal code. This speech act—the utterance marks the body with ownership,
intervenes in its future—depends upon a disciplinary network of organ donation
and “maintenance” that ultimately relies on the possibility of transmitting coded
commands over time, in a code outside of time. This coding of the body over time, the
program of cryonic production and revival, is continually threatened by the insuffi-

D i s c i p l i n e d b y t h e F u t u r e
ciency of the coded body: “we don’t have a radio-powered heart monitor attached to
those Alcor tags, folks.” This perceived insufficiency of the coded body produces a
constant, nearly frenzied attempt to code the cryonic subject, a coding that is in part
carried out by the online cryonics community.
A particularly persistent and sometimes acrimonious exchange
on CryoNet concerns the status of a personal “archive,” a bundle of information
that accompanies the individual cryonic body in order to stoke the memories of the
revived patient. Here the physicality and limits of coding come to the fore, as the
coding of the cryonic subject—in anticipation of a future reading—becomes a near
constant concern in the present. The very anticipations that concern the production
and revival of a cryonic body—the need to produce a code outside of time, or at least
one readable in the future—haunt the archive as well:
The issue is whether you want to put out data and hope that someone can
reconstruct it, or whether you want to do the best job of storage you can do.
This is much like when people doing cryonics don’t simply flash freeze people
and hope that the technology will be good enough someday—they try to do
the best possible preservation so as to minimize the work people have to do
in the future and maximize odds that the person can be fixed. Well, are you
trying to maximize the odds that your data will go through, or not? Some-
thing that survives to the future without the need for reconstruction has far
better odds of being read than something that requires reconstruction. (Cryo-
Net, message 5663)
Just how these “odds” can be evaluated, of course, remains to be seen, but for most
cryonicists on the net, the more discipline that can be exerted on the data—the
more it can be insulated, if not encapsulated, from the operations of time—the better.
Indeed, the constant anticipation of a need for memories in the future seems to be
the very “purpose” of the present, as in this rather Borgesian scenario:
If I had huge amounts of money I might well hire a team to follow me about
videoing my life and taking notes about every little thing I did and said. If I
had more stamina I might write a very detailed diary myself and have it
stored, which would be a relatively cheap option, and actually would be pretty
useful, given the way my life has gone so far. A diary might even bring in
some revenue this side of the dewar. (CryoNet, message 5620)15
The very volume and intensity of the exchanges concerning the archiving of personal
information indexes the possibility that as “informational beings,” cryonicists are

almost as concerned with the survival of “external” information as “internal” infor-
mation. Indeed, in the cases cited above, the very difference between the two seems
to disappear, as does the distinction between “life” and “preparation for revival.”
Still, Mike Darwin, a well-known and controversial cryonicist with a penchant for
pragmatics and polemic, sees the difference between archive and flesh as significant
indeed. Addressing a discussion of compact disks as appropriate archival media, Dar-
win writes,
You guys are worried about decoding CDs. Talk about dumb and dumber.
The information on how to do that exists; algorithms are used in existing
players; get them. The principles are simple. What gives me a belly laugh is
that while you all agonize over CD formats being accessible, adhesives decay-
ing, metal pitting, etc. you seem quite happy to have your brains all hashed
up and then blithely expect someone to decode that mess, and without the
instruction manual. Talk about misplaced priorities. (CryoNet, message 5576)
But perhaps Darwin’s intervention, insofar as it relies on the alleged stupidity of the
discussion, misses a crucial point: for many cryonicists, apprehension about the stabil-
ity of archival media over time is in some sense a discussion about the possibility of
revival in the future; the very operations that disturb the possibility of an archive—
decay, the sheer difference of the future (“will they have CD players?!”), fire (“At
least while you are animate . . . a personal archive refrigerator is helpful in many
ways.” [CryoNet, message 5591]) also threaten cryonic bodies. Indeed, reflection on
the common project of archiving texts, photos, and bodies leads to the remarkable
news that CryoNet should itself be part of the “gateway to the future.”
One way to save some material about yourself is to publish. Published mate-
rial is widely disseminated. There is a good chance that at least one copy will
survive. Which brings us to CryoNet Digest. What is published on CryoNet
Digest is certainly stored in a many places (at least for a while), but is there a
plan for systematically archiving the pearls of information, wit, and wisdom
we see everyday on the net? (CryoNet, message 5564)
Thus the “information” deployed in cryonics is anything but immaterial. It is a con-
stant commitment to the future in the present, a commitment with material conse-
quences that extend well beyond the expense and oddity of compiling one’s own
archive for the future. Consider the surveillance system suggested by Mike Darwin
in response to the fear of an unreported death. After the death of a cryonics subscriber
who was not found until he had decomposed for three days (he was writing his thesis

D i s c i p l i n e d b y t h e F u t u r e
in philosophy), rendering cryonic preservation impossible, Darwin suggested the
following procedure:
Standard alarm components that sense motion can be mounted throughout a
house. When you come into the house you turn the keypad on. If there is no
motion for say more than 30 minutes, the systems sounds a local alarm which
can be manually overridden in say 5 minutes. If it is not overriden it can dial
911 or the cryonics group or a neighbor, etc. And, anticipating a likely objec-
tion: sleeping people move; they breathe, they toss they turn, etc. A more
sensitive detector is needed for the bed, but they exist and are inexpensive;
kinds for mattresses and kinds for overhead mounting (infrared). By the bed
is a cancel switch and a panic button. Panic button triggers that can be worn
on necklaces are commercially available that can be tied into the system for
several hundred dollars more . . . When you leave, you key out. True it won’t
help if you die away from home, but so far exactly none of the cases of un-
attended SCD have occurred anywhere else. And this is a good start. (Cryo-
Net, message 5576)
Thus cryonics, more than a treatment of a legally dead body,
becomes a disciplinary operation of the living. The opposition between “life” and
“death” is undone not only on the basis of a revival yet to come, but in a present that
becomes a constant rehearsal for the future, a future not quite here, not quite dead.
This remarkable commitment or discipline extends to the rhetor-
ical possibility conditions that have made the cryonic body thinkable. Of course,
cryonics is itself a heterogeneous field, with multiple sites of contestation and differ-
ence. Indeed, the CryoNet electronic mailing list and Usenet group that form the
archive for my research are composed of these differences. One of the most active
sites of difference in the cryonics community is the “uploading” argument popular-
ized in part by computer scientist Hans Moravec.
It is easy to imagine human thought freed from bondage to a mortal body. . .
A computation in progress—what we can reasonably call a computer’s
thought process—can be halted in midstep and transferred, as a program
and data read out of the machine’s memory, into a physically different com-
puter, there to resume as though nothing had happened. Imagine that a
human mind might be freed from its brain in some analogous (if much more
technically challenging) way.16
By contrast, cryonicists such as Robert Ettinger argue for the specificity of corporeal
embodiment. But both the defenders of the “body” and the aficionados of silicon

share a preunderstanding: they articulate the body as pure code. As Microsoft founder
and media event Bill Gates told biographers Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews,
both the body and consciousness become a “software problem.”17
It is clear enough that the implosions I discussed above and else-
where, the conflation of life and information, are crucial rhetorical vectors for the
uploaders; “copying” humans onto a floppy disk is in some sense merely a logical
conclusion of biologist Richard Dawkins’s claim that DNA is a floppy disk. Perhaps
it is less apparent, however, that the promise accorded corporeal revival is itself tied
to the ability of the body—and not merely its subjectivity as owner, owned—to be-
come code.
Becoming Crypt
Ralph Merkle, a nanotechnology researcher at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research
Center) and a prominent cryonicist, underscores the coded nature of the cryonic
body in his research essay, “Cryonics, Cryptography, and Maximum Likelihood Esti-
mation.”18 While I must again highlight the heterogeneous nature of the cryonics
community, it is also true that Merkle occupies an important place in the world of
cryonics theory. “Cryonics, Cryptography, and Maximum Likelihood Estimation”
thus offers us one of the most talked-about and respected “revival scenarios,” the
part-technical, part-fictional texts—literally, science fiction—that are the currency
of cryonics’ claim to a futures market in bodies.
The pun, of course, is obvious: “Crypt” refers not just to the no-
tion of a cipher or a secret; it also names the very object that cryonics aims to open up,
to empty. It is upon this pun, I will try to show, that Merkle’s revival scenario hinges.
After a long discussion of the difficulties of cryonic revival, Merkle recasts the ques-
tion, and, indeed, the body:
So the question of whether or not we can revive a person who has been
frozen can be transformed into a new question: can we cryptanalyze the “en-
crypted message” that is the frozen person and deduce the “plain text” which
is the healthy person that we wish to restore? Are the “cryptographic trans-
formations” applied during freezing sufficient to thwart our cryptanalytic
skill for all time?19
What makes possible this transformation of the question of revival? While there are
a number and a network of presuppositions that make the translation of the body
into code plausible, the characterization of the body into nothing but an extension

D i s c i p l i n e d b y t h e F u t u r e
of a code, DNA, marks out one of the more obvious possibilities. For surely, if the
body is itself nothing but a lumbering robot, a machine dedicated to the continuation
and propagation of selfish DNA, then it can also itself be rendered as code. If molec-
ular biology fostered a forgetting of the body and a remembering of code, DNA,
then cryonics enables a return of the body, the body as code.
But the analogy between the cryonic corpse and a cipher remains
suspended in difference. For while a cipher represents a systematic transformation
of a plain text, a text known by some subject in the past, the cryonic body signifies
an absence of such knowledge. A revival of the cryonic body relies on what, precisely,
those of us in the past do not know, and as such cannot inscribe.
For example: Any coding of the subjectivity of a cryonic subject
would demand a knowledge of subjectivity in the present, a precise characterization
of the answer to the question, Who is the cryonic subject? Any such answer would
need, at the very least, to meet the challenge of the Turing Test: when faced with
their own subjectivity, the cryonic subject would not be able to tell who was talking
to whom, whether or not she was simply talking with herself. Needless to say, such a
precise coding of subjectivity remains a promise, as the subject is precisely the one
who doesn’t know who she is talking to; transcendence is impossible at that location.
One could never know if one had succeeded or not; any answer would be haunted by
the fact that one might be speaking with an other, if not the other, that one might
simply be speaking to oneself.20
There may indeed be more material limitations on this coding
than technological ones. For if subjectivity—as Butler, for example, insists—is a
process of iteration and not an essential attribute, then the coding of a subjectivity
becomes not just implausible, but impossible. For such subjectivity forbids the possi-
bility of a transcendental position on its “own” subjectivity; such a position would be
merely one more iteration of the subject, not one that arrests the becoming of iden-
tity into being once and for all.
Of course, something other than a simple subjectivity may operate
here: subjectivity’s double. If the iterative process of subjectivity shatters any possibil-
ity of a simply mimetic or disclosive articulation of the crypt/cipher of subjectivity,
then the production of a cryonic subject in Merkle’s scenario summons the uncanny
fact that “subjects,” as iterative becomings, aren’t even identical to themselves.21
This uncanniness, while troubling the production of immortality as an endless ren-
dering of the same—“me me me”—fosters an encounter with becomings other than
freezing, becoming static. Indeed, this “static” produced by becoming-frozen tunes

our ears to the multiplicity at play in the disciplines and machines of identity; Merkle’s
deployment of the machine analogy reminds us that contemporary subjectivities are
precisely the effect of a contingent assemblage of machines, an inhuman ecology
that lives off difference. Perhaps in this regard, Walt Disney’s body and subjectivity
is more illustrative of postmodern subjectivity than we would like to admit: alive,
dead, or animated, subjectivity demands difference. More on difference and its de-
mands later, I promise.
It may seem that the body represents a more straightforward
cryptographic possibility. For if subjectivity resists a total inscription—if it’s as much
an element in the discourse suffusing the subject as an attribute of the subject “her-
self”—then certainly the body is its own best record. But the body is already a ruined
text, unreadable even in the present. The cryptographic model of revival, the trans-
formation of the body into code, would seem to demand an “original” body, a plain
text that would order, irreducibly, the entropic transformations of time. The remains
of a body, then, would harbor information, information that testified more to a future
life than the cause of death. Merkle compares this persistence of the corporeal media
to the national security challenges posed by the difficulties of erasure:
As experience with erasing top secret media has demonstrated, it’s hard to
get rid of information when sophisticated means of data recovery are em-
ployed. And we’ll have very sophisticated means of data recovery available to
us in the future.22
But again, this notion that a secret can be retrieved even after its destruction depends
upon an original existence of the secret. A secret is a knowledge that is hidden, and
the scale and depth of knowledge of an individual body that Merkle’s revival scenario
demands is not hidden—it is simply not known. Perhaps it is not known for good
reason: like identity, the body entails not so much being as an unpredictably complex
becoming, a dynamic, differentiating event and not a static object. Thus the revival
scenario depends not so much on knowledge in the future as in the present—a knowl-
edge of what bodies “are” and what subjectivity “is.” By analogy, our reading of the
title of Merkle’s text—is it a pun or isn’t it?—remains undecidable in the present, as
it entails a dynamic event of rhetorical resonance and not a simple inscription of in-
formation. No amount of cryptographic skill, now or in the future, will tell us what
“crypt” “really” “means.”
Still, while the analogy of cryptography may not hold insofar as
one compares the body to a scrambled plain text, we may still preserve the possibil-
ities that Merkle’s cryonic revival scheme engenders. For the production of a cryonic

D i s c i p l i n e d b y t h e F u t u r e
body does not depend so much on the semantic fitness of its rhetorics as on the
pragmatic formations of power and knowledge that they make possible. Molecular
biology was made plausible and enacted on the basis of equally problematic tropes;
the genetic “code,” the notion of genetic “information,” among others, were rhetor-
ical softwares that were constitutive of molecular biology even as they opened up
lacunae in its “foundations.” It is possible that the cryptographic body, networked
with the material, rhetorical practices that suffuse it, will make plausible equally un-
precedented knowledges. The work of thinking is to be something other than wit-
nesses to this cryptographic body. Indeed, perhaps we must render the cryonic body
and its attendant technological transformations in terms of a tool box for becoming
other, recipes that will cultivate a future of some difference.
Speeding to a Freezing, Anticipatory Speeding
If I have highlighted the rhetorical dependencies and difficulties that enable and
trouble the production of cryonic subjects and bodies, I do so not to critique the
project of cryonics. The attempt to preserve bodies and subjects provides us with a
map of contemporary biotechnology—what bodies and subjects can be produced,
today?—and it is in this spirit that I research and study the rhetoric of cryonics. But
cryonics, of course, is also concerned with what bodies and subjects might become.
For if the production of cryonic subjects and bodies seems to depend on a vanishing
point of total knowledge in the future, it also produces a set of effects on the be-
coming that is the body. What effect does cryonics have in the present? To return to
the question with which we began, what business is cryonics in, now?
If cryonics is in the business of producing a virtual body, it is a
body of anticipation. For if the corpse has been, in our memory, a body of memory,
cryonics transforms the corpse into an anticipated body. The frenzy that now greets
the death of a cryonicist is a measure of this transformation. Robert F. Nelson de-
scribes this frenzied anticipation in We Froze the First Man: The Startling True Story
of the First Great Step toward Human Immortality. Nelson, learning of the death of the
first cryonics “patient,” speeds toward the death scene:
If there is a law I didn’t break driving to Glendale that afternoon, it hasn’t
been written yet. I put my foot to the floor and proceeded at breakneck
speed, oblivious to red lights, stop signs, pedestrians, only vaguely aware of
the squealing of brakes all around me.23
The endless process of disciplining, preparing the cryonic body, accelerates. By con-
trast to the sense of resignation, grief, and closure that attends most contemporary

death scenes—“We did all we could”—clinical death marks only the acceleration of
an endless, proleptic labor. If the body is to become code, to become readable by
and in the future, then the cryonics organization must continually anticipate that
reading. The moment of death marks the acceleration, and not the arrest, of the
treatment of the cryonic body, becoming frozen, becoming code. As such, the trip to
Glendale marks a new vision of a favorite sitcom tableau: the dangerous and frenzied
journey demanded by a laboring body, the strange complicity of the speeding car in
the birth of a human.
The anticipation above is not simply a physical rush toward the
dead body, it is also the anticipation of a law that will not have been broken, a future
law that nonetheless holds sway over the present. “If there is a law I didn’t break
driving to Glendale that afternoon, it hasn’t been written yet.” Nelson’s initial
swerve toward cryonics breaks the law(s) of the present, but this present, the cryonic
present, is understandable only from the standpoint of the future, a law of the future
that Nelson obeys rather than transgresses. This law—unwritten, yet perhaps writable
in, with, the future—is perhaps the law that emerges with the cryonic body, the law
of prolepsis that cryonicists anticipate. They anticipate a future of anticipation, a fu-
ture for whom the past is nothing other than the anticipation of the present. The
cryonic subject only wants what science already has for itself—a law that will hold for
all time: that life, and not just matter, should be neither created nor destroyed.24
As machines for the production of identity in the future, the cry-
onic assemblage is a reef of signification and subjectivity, a franchise on the plane of
transcendence. As such, cryonics sends the future the worst symptom of the present,
a frozen pocket of interiority. And yet cryonic desire is also something other than
the desire to be a subject; it is an experiment in becoming a scientific object. Rather
than merely observing the infinite operations of scientific laws on that stable back-
ground, the “universe,” cryonicists desire to become laws themselves, endless repeti-
tions that hold for all time. Cryonics fosters a body continually anticipating a judg-
ment of the future, and in its anticipation it eludes containment by any univocal
judgment, as the status of the cryonic body is anything but decidable; it is to come.
The cryonic body is not, then, simply the instantiation of bad
conscience taken to its limit, a mobilization of power that allows flesh to leap out of
the hell of time, to make time stop, to finally constitute the body as a pause function
in a nonstop negentropy machine. It is a body composed of speed that experiments
on and with time, a production not of stasis but of waiting. Cryonics is not so much
an attempt to avoid the great lack of death as the purchase of a certain style of
death, a death of some difference. Something other than mourning clings to the cry-

D i s c i p l i n e d b y t h e F u t u r e
onic body, an unthinkable and incalculable future that, of course, in its formulation
is nothing other than the articulation of the present. Hence the oddity of the cryonic
body: As with the rhetorical suspension of Disney’s subjectivity—Is he or isn’t he?—
the cryonic body is a production of irreducible difference, flickering in and out of
time, in and out of possibility with each new articulation of its description and treat-
ment. Perhaps this explains the massive discourse produced by cryonics: like sexuality
for the Victorians, the cryonic body must be incessantly and continually described,
judged, evaluated, explained. This intensive evaluation—as in the endless surveil-
lance discussed by Darwin above—provokes a rhetorical crisis: How to evaluate a
transaction that takes place in the future?
What is the value of a life-saving surgical operation? What is the value of
being cryonically suspended? It isn’t infinite—there isn’t yet enough money
in the world to give every ill person every possible medical treatment that
might help. But wherever the line is drawn, some people will be condemned
to death. Should government be the one to draw this line? . . . Or should it be
triage via waiting list, in which if 100 people need a life-saving treatment,
and the government has allocated resources to treat 60, the 100 will be forced
to wait until 40 of them have died? Or perhaps a lottery? Or a TV show
whose viewers vote by phone on which patient’s pleading was the most pa-
thetic and moving? (CryoNet, message 5075)
It is the very impossibility of evaluating such a future event that constitutes the cryonic
body. As a production of anticipation, cryonics is oriented around an invisible, un-
verifiable point of comparison, a space and time of impossible evaluation, a moment
of sheer difference, the difference of revival. The constitutive ambiguity of cryonics,
rather than a lack that threatens the coherence of the decision—“How could I make
a decision based on an absence of knowledge?”—produces an economy of excess, an
economy in which there can never be enough evaluation.
Perhaps most cryobiologists perceive cryonics advocates as implicitly claim-
ing a probability of revival of 50–90%, and therefore see us as frauds, a per-
ception they wouldn’t have if they thought we were only claiming a 1%
chance of success. If only one or two cryonics folks have published specific
probability predictions, perhaps we should do more public probability estima-
tion before complaining that the other side doesn’t do any. My home page
announces I think I have at least a 5% chance of revival. Have you big-name
cryonics folks announced your estimated probability of revival? (CryoNet,
message 5627)

While the “value” of a cryonics contract is not infinite, the task
of evaluating it is. We could characterize this endless process of evaluating cryonics
as a failure, a differend whose resolution relies on premises and technologies from
the future. But rather than thematizing this as a loss—which cryonics, faced with
death, can’t do—I would like to briefly highlight the effects that this infinite evalua-
tion produces in the present. The evaluation of a cryonics contract—lining up capi-
tal with bodies in a coherent fashion—also produces what Brian Rotman has charac-
terized as “being-Besides-oneself,” a doubling of subjectivity he associates with the
emergence of parallel processes, a parallel “subjectivity.”25 For the evaluation of cry-
onics is, to perversely follow Shapin and Schaffer, a kind of virtual witnessing of one’s
own death. More than a desire to live forever or to avoid death, cryonics fosters the
desire to remain present at one’s own death, to double one’s self, to go parallel.
Thus the frenzy that inheres in the cryonic body that surrounds
it like liquid nitrogen is exuded by the double tension of cryonics, the tension of the
double. Oozing with transcendence—the desire to master one’s own death, to see
it—cryonic bodies also secrete immanence, a decoupling of bodies from loss, the
production of something other than a simply doubled subjectivity: a parallel subject
that shatters the unity of the “one” who is becoming-frozen. Destratifying the subject
by launching it through and out of time, cryonics also enables a scientific body, a
body that would itself, like the truth, be untarnished by finitude. The coming of the
cryonic body—and it is coming, more about that later—resonates with the double-
ness of the plane of consistency and transcendence. This doubleness is the space of
the future, and perhaps contemporary, body, a body within and without time, within
and without the computer, a Möbius body.
Deriving the Cryonic Body
In mapping out the possibilities of the cryonic body, I have tended to focus on the
ways in which becoming-frozen is thinkable, articulable in the material, rhetorical
ecology of cryonics. But beyond the networks of rhetorical and material practices
that are complicit with the emergence of the cryonic body, it would be some measure
of contemporary distributions of the body and desire to determine the naturalization
of cryonics, the investment of cryonics with a telos toward which we have been
striving all along, as a kind of end point of the anthropic principle, an algorithm that
suggests that the universe exists through and for the purposive gaze of human subjects,
subjects whose very purpose is to be frozen, to pause, to slow down. Indeed, I am often
struck by the ease with which many people, myself included, come to regard cryonics

D i s c i p l i n e d b y t h e F u t u r e
as a natural, and almost inevitable, desire. In its slow discursive bleed from science
fiction to science/fiction, cryonics seems to have left the very fantasmatic luster that
suspends, like so many masochists, belief.
The shedding of this fantastic resonance is complicit with a new
figuration of the future itself, a writing practice that is quite literally beyond value,
beyond the metaphysics of valuation, the derivative. Derivatives, as writing practices
that in some sense write on or with future, dramatize the articulation of the cryonics
contract as a contract made out of something yet to come. As such, the rhetorical
softwares that traverse cryonics and certain flavors of derivatives also map out the
emergence of something other than capital, capital’s advance. But what, to ask a
question in advance, is a derivative?
Brian Rotman describes the transformations that overtook math-
ematics, painting, and finance with the introduction of zero as a “metasign,” a sign
that, semiotically speaking, stands for the absence of other signs. Zero, Rotman writes,
“is thus a sign about signs, a meta-sign, whose meaning as a name lies in the way it
indicates the absence of the names 1, 2, . . . , 9.”26 Beyond his interrogation of the
semiotic operations of mathematics, Rotman locates isomorphic discursive transfor-
mations in painting and finance. Rotman demonstrates that the vanishing point in
painting, as correlative of zero in a visual grammar, organizes the possibility of a
viewing subject, a subject for whom the perspectival painting becomes a talisman
that provokes the artist’s point of view. More than a simple inscription of a prior
subjectivity into the medium of paint, light, and canvas, then, the vanishing point is
a discursive machine that orders or installs a subjectivity through the recursive oper-
ation of the meta-sign—a sign of signs that provokes something like reflexivity, as
perspective offers the spectator the possibility of objectifying himself, the means of
perceiving himself, from the outside, as a unitary seeing subject, since each image
makes a deictic declaration: this is how I see (or would see) some real or imagined
scene from this particular spot at this particular moment in time.27
This achievement of the vanishing point, a rhetorical articulation
of nowhere that, like zero, signifies nothing, makes possible the evaluation of the
painting; as the possibility of objectification, the vanishing point makes it possible
for the viewer to understand how others would see the painting as well, a recursive
operation that enables exchange, the exchange of evaluation.
Given this description of the semiotic operations of the vanishing
point as productive of a certain style of viewer in the aesthetic encounter or trans-
action, it is easy to see the rhetorical ecologies enabled by the shifting status of

monetary signs. For example, the substitution of the sign of currency as a representa-
tional machine for transmitting the value of gold increases the velocity of any given
transaction—no species metal must be delivered for the rhetorical moment of a
transaction to occur. The act of evaluation could now occur at a distance—in space
or time—from its transcendental guarantee, gold. “Reference” or “the representation
effect” becomes one of the necessary components of any economic transaction under
such a regime, and, as Rotman points out, any such representational regime is haunted
by the possibility of forgery. Thus the demand for not simply species metal that cur-
rency “refers” to, but of a subject—such as a state or a corporation—that is the ab-
sent “evaluator” of any given currency. To paraphrase Rotman, “this is how I, from
the outside of this transaction, see this currency.” If the degree zero of the vanishing
point enabled the spatial depth of painting, the virtual enactment of the viewing
subject, the rhetorical economy of currency promised value at a distance, both in
time and space.
When this regime of reference was finally evaluated and aban-
doned at Bretton Woods in 1972, the ghost of the “evaluator” in this semiotic econ-
omy was gone. No longer was any “subject” outside the regime of transaction evalu-
ating currency, giving it its perspective, the eye of god that adorns the back of U.S.
currency. Instead, the evaluation of U.S. currency—and, by extension, the world
financial markets—became a practice embedded in the future. The “outside ob-
server” that guaranteed any given transaction was immanent to the market, as the
eye of god moved into the future, a futures market. Futures markets took over the
role of absent observer implied in every transaction, as currency markets collectively
declared, “This is how I, outside of your transaction, evaluate money.” It is as if the
financial vanishing point itself vanished, invisibly perched on the other side of the
present, guaranteeing currency from the future.
As you have probably anticipated, derivatives continue and accel-
erate this shift of the financial vanishing point. While the term “derivative” is itself
imprecise—“the term derivatives is not really well defined. It has become a catch-all
generic term that has been used to include all types of new (and some old) financial
instruments”28—a small percentage of the futures markets is comprised by futures
contracts that cannot themselves be resold, or “marked to market.” Without the
market as the absent but available “evaluator” in this rhetorical economy, so-called
exotic derivatives mark yet another shift in the financial vanishing point, the collective
and implied financial sovereign that oversees each transaction. Who or what “evalu-
ates” derivatives in the absence of a market?

D i s c i p l i n e d b y t h e F u t u r e
The Derivative Subject; or, A Specter Is Haunting Markets
Today, we must ask ourselves whether Wall Street’s young rocket scientists, like the old
Tom Lehrer song, have concluded that “I just shot them up, I don’t care where they come
down, that is not my department, says Werner Von Braun.”
Representative Edward Markey
In 1992, faced with recent high-profile derivatives losses, the House Subcommittee
on Telecommunications and Finance inquired into the derivatives market. What
new risks does the market pose? What regulations can and ought the Federal Govern-
ment enact to avoid “a chain reaction of losses and defaults that drain liquidity from
our financial markets”?29 The House and its expert witnesses, in their figuration of
exotic derivatives as “recombinant financial DNA,” mark out the peculiar character
of financial subject installed by such “financial engineering.”
For the threat of derivatives, from the perspective of both the
regulation-friendly Congressional speakers and the experts who filed into the com-
mittee room poised to resist such regulation, is the derivative’s distance from an ori-
gin. Like the recombinant DNA techniques with which it is rhetorically rendered,
derivatives thwart any attempt to map out a “natural” relationship between an orig-
inal—organism or market—and its simulacrum. Indeed, it is precisely in the space
between the market and its various models that the derivative lives. Consider the
following exchange concerning the evaluation of derivatives between then Represen-
tative Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Peter Vinella, a senior consultant at
Smith Barney Shearson, and an expert on derivatives.
MR. RICHARDSON: Mr. Vinella, given the uncertainies and assumptions sur-
rounding marking to a model, how reliable are the values derived from such
a process?
MR. VINELLA: Well, in some cases it is the only chance you have of coming
up with a price. As the issues become more specific to an individual in-
vestor’s needs, they become less traded on the secondary market, therefore,
mathematical models are really the only hope of coming up with a good idea
of where the security should be priced.30
To parse the rhetorical economy of these transactions: Exotic derivatives, financial
instruments with near zero liquidity—they cannot be resold on any market; in the
words of one expert, “The Market is you”—provoke a crisis of evaluation. With no

external market in which to be bought and sold, evaluated, the derivative floats with-
out reference to any “price.” How are firms to disclose and report the risk and value
of derivatives? Since the very structure of capital in its accounting demands precisely
such a disclosure—one must, in some sense, know what has been bought, what is
owned—something other than the market produces the required evaluation “effect.”
This evaluation is effected through “marking to model,” computer simulations that
evaluate, if not determine the “price” in a kind of Sim market.
Hence the stories of loss associated with the derivative, ultimately
the loss of reference and the production of anticipation. For the derivative can only
have an anticipated value, as the difference between the simulation of a market and a
market is a difference that cannot be bought off, an unpredictable algorithmically
complex difference that will not go away, at least not right now. Therefore something
other than contemporary human subjectivity or markets underwrites or advances the
derivative, perhaps a human that becomes the financial subject only retroactively,
perhaps only after its death; the derivative casts its shadow from the future.
In the stock and bond markets, the public dissemination of price quotes and
transaction information allows all market participants to see clearly the cur-
rent price of a security. But when it comes to derivatives, for now we see
through a glass darkly. So who knows what prices and risks lurk in the OTC
derivatives market? Often, only the “Shadow” knows.31
Thus the distance of the derivative from a “price” is cast as a loss of knowledge and of
vision, a shadow cast from a lurking presence in the future, a presence that, “for now,”
projects an unclear specter. The structural impossibility of evaluating the derivative in
the present—for it can be modeled, and not known, and the precise risk and produc-
tivity of the derivative resides in this difference—raises the question of who or what
will “know” the value of a derivative in the future.32 For Fredric Jameson, the funda-
mental inaccessibility of this knowledge is characteristic of late capitalism in general:
These new and enormous global realities are inaccessible to any individual
subject or consciousness—not even to Hegel, let alone Cecil Rhodes or
Queen Victoria—which is to say that those fundamental realities are some-
how ultimately unrepresentable or, to use the Althusserian phrase, are some-
thing like an absent cause, one that can never emerge into the presence of
perception.33
But rather than following Jameson here in his formulation of an “absent cause” that
fuels global capital, the exotic derivative seems to demand a mapping of a cause from

D i s c i p l i n e d b y t h e F u t u r e
the future, not absent, but to come. For while the reality of exotic derivatives is “un-
representable” in the present (the “presence of perception”), they nonetheless yield
an anticipation of a future perception, a future evaluation, a future reading. If exotic
derivatives resist representation in the present, it is only because they are, like the
cryonic body, residing in the future.
While the discourse of expertise that accompanies derivatives
also focuses on this narrative of loss, a narrative in which the present is the site at
which a network of humans and machines fail to evaluate the exotic derivative, we
might instead notice what it is that derivatives produce in the present. Peter Vinella,
a senior consultant with Smith Barney Shearson, spoke about the use of derivatives
as a financial tool and not merely a hedge:
One of the examples is McDonald’s going into Japan . . . In order to fund
that, they went into the derivatives market. They issued corporate debt here
and used derivatives to translate that into the Japanese operation . . . Just look-
ing at the derivatives contract by itself would be meaningless. You wouldn’t
understand why McDonald’s came up with this complicated structure. If you
stress tested it by itself, you wouldn’t understand that underneath it they are
also selling hamburgers, which is the other side of the trade.34
“Meaningless” in the present, the derivative contract described above nonetheless
yields something now: anticipated hamburgers, Big Macs to come. As a speech act,
then, exotic derivatives produce not “meaning” but anticipation, an effect in the
present, a becoming-burger.
This economy of anticipation also seems to be provoked by the
exposure to concepts of cryonics. In the preface to Robert Ettinger’s manifesto for
cryonics, The Prospect of Immortality, Jean Rostand sees a business opportunity:
While reading this book, I was reminded of the Belgian businessman who in
the early days of World War II heard rumors about the possibility of atomic
fission. He ordered a large supply of uranium from the Congo and sent it to
warehouses near New York just in time for the atomic bomb project. I must
confess that were I interested in business speculation, I should be busily
stockpiling equipment needed for Mr. Ettinger’s project.35
In the present, both derivatives and cryonics effect anticipation, anticipation of a fu-
ture that will transform both the cryonics contract and the derivative algorithm into
meaningful speech acts. Rostand’s confession tells the truth about cryonics: the future
that is bundled with cryonics is primarily a site of anticipation, a moment for which

one should, in the present, “busily” prepare. This is a common enough figuration;
the future, death-oriented character of the modern subject is not news.
But the notion of the future built into cryonics and exotic deriva-
tives marks out a peculiar difference in this notion of preparation: the unverifiable
nature of the future is turned into a positivity, a condition that enables rather than
thwarts the production of new knowledges and capital formations. Both cryonics
and exotic derivatives thrive as capital formations that are beyond the market. Based
on shadows, “rumors” of the future, both the cryonics and the exotic derivative con-
tract are unverifiable in the present. As such, they are not only sites for a cause from
the future—an anticipated cause, one we busily prepare for—but also sites disciplined
by the future.36
Disciplined by the Future
Whereas Foucault has emphasized the panoptic spaces of discipline, the visible and
yet unverifiable operation of the Panopticon, a machine that mobilized uncertainty
in the production of criminal subjectivity, contemporary global capital seems to be
fueled by visible and yet unverifiable inputs from the future—a future body of cryon-
ics, the future capital of the exotic derivative. As a kind of Brennschluss of subjectiv-
ity—I just shot them up, I don’t care where they come down, that is not my department, says
Werner Von Braun—both cryonics and exotic derivatives are constituted out of, driven
by, the uncertain future that inheres in each. Indeed, the cryonic body is the thought
of a subject for whom the uncertain future of capital is articulable. Cryonics is not
merely the export of a subject into the future; it is the evaluator and the body of a
capital that is yet to come.
Thus both exotic derivatives and cryonic bodies exchange an
economy of reference for an engine of anticipation. Neither refer, in the present, to
anything; they are contracts with the future. The status of these contracts is, of
course, contingent in the present, as undecidable as the character of Disney’s body.
Contemporary global capital appears to need this difference, a difference between
the present and the future that is undecidable and yet endlessly evaluated.
This notion of the future as an uncertain positivity, an entity that
can be mobilized and encountered in the present, is neither the Laplacian dream of
transcendence nor an eruption of prophecy. For both cryonics and exotic derivatives,
the core of undecidability that inheres in each contract is a natural consequence of
its hybrid status. A cryptographic body, generated out of the enmeshed ecologies of
metaphor in the present and nanotechnology in the future, is tied to the finitudes as

D i s c i p l i n e d b y t h e F u t u r e
well as the possibilities of the very computers that enable it. For computers, too, are
haunted by contingency:
If we knew what the result of a computer program would be, there would be
little point in writing or running it. In fact, it’s a fundamental theorem of
computer theory that in the general case, there’s no way to tell what a program
will do, other than to run it and see what happens.(CryoNet, message 5310)
The dual dice throws of cryonics and exotic derivatives are thus constituted out of
the material constraints of computation, disciplines of the machine whose status
only becomes clear in the future. Disciplined by the future, the present anticipates
but suspends judgment. Mike Darwin, the cryonics technician discussed above, in-
habits this contingency, recognizing the signs of discipline on bodies in the present,
but unable to evaluate them. Speaking of the effects of current cryonic techniques
on bodies, Darwin eschews discussion of abstract models of human memory:
Since we are apparently grinding brains into chopped steak (I won’t go so far
to say hamburger, and get everybody upset) with existing techniques I see
little point in spending my time on evaluating memory in a model which
does not have much to do with what we are really doing to human cryo-
preservation patients. (CryoNet, message 4117)
The real, rather than “apparent” effect of the present will perhaps only, become visi-
ble in a future in which the becoming of exotic derivatives will also materialize in the
form of new infrastructure, new capital, new burgers. In the meantime, the difference
between hamburger and cryonic bodies is, at the moment, in the end, uncertain.
Suspended.

F O U R

The brain has lost its Euclidean coordinates, and now emits other signs.
Gilles Deleuze
Faxing Lazarus
so whose car was this anyway? It was like waking up in a strange room, those few
moments before you figure out where you are, where the bathroom is, the time.
A friend lent me his car to drive the hour or so—distance always being imploded
into hours in “The Southland”—from Irvine to Rancho Cucamonga, and for a
blink, a long one, I forgot that I was encased in somebody else’s appliance, hurtling
past Disneyland. The cars ahead slowed, and I fumbled around with the map, won-
dering if I had already missed one of the numbers I was supposedly searching for.
The red tendrils that traverse the map reminded me of visuals of a synapse I had
seen when I was a freshman in college, which is precisely my problem with maps:
they always make me think of something, someplace, else. Paul, the friend with the
car, had written me out a recipe for getting there: 73 north to 55 (forks right) to 5 to
57 to 10 east. This was his way of helping me avoid getting lost or arrested.
I had spoken four days earlier with Mike Darwin, head of 21st
Century Medicine, subcontractor for the cryonics organization CryoCare. CryoCare
“Give Me a Body, Then”:
Corporeal Time-Images

was a new upstart cryonics care provider, located close to the Ontario, California
airport for high-velocity body delivery and cooldown, perfusion. You were two flights
and a short pause of a layover from almost anywhere, so whatever forces carry bodies
all over the world in order to freeze them had an eddy, a whirlpool of anticipation
and frenzied movement, in Rancho Cucamonga. Darwin, though, was no novice.
Exact numbers are difficult to come by in the world of cryonics—we will only have
them with revival, retroactively, after the Singularity and nanotechnology reconstruct
us atom by atom—but Mike had frozen scores of humans, and plenty of dogs, includ-
ing Lazarus, a dog I was about to meet.
I was speeding, doing eighty-five even though I had no driver’s
license, because I was stupid. I was stupid because I had fallen asleep in the library
reading a book about comas—The Catastrophe of Coma—as a way of trying to come
to terms with Deleuze’s understanding of the new cinema, “A disturbed brain-death
or a new brain which would be at once the screen, the film stock and the camera,
each time membrane of the inside and the outside” and left late for my 5:00 P.M. ap-
pointment with Darwin.1 I had to go fast; I had, after all, justified the whole trip to
California in terms of the alleged interview I was to make with some cryonicists.
Here I was with no tape recorder, no idea of questions, and increasingly late. What
was I doing?
The mountain, whose name I don’t know, had a dusting of snow,
and there was no smog as I drove through Chino, a town with long, wide streets, as-
phalt ribbons peeling off the mountain like so much skin. Often, the streets flowed
here with thick, biting smog, making your eyes burn until you look and feel stoned
from some of that Humboldt bud the hippies bring down on Interstate 5 and sell in
little numismatic bags in Venice. A recent rain and a wind had freshened the air, and
for some reason I was reassured. It didn’t look like Southern California.
Haven Street leads to Civic Center, and Darwin instructed me
to start counting fire hydrants as I turned the corner, since his was between the sixth
and the seventh on the street. Had I missed one? Where’s the first one? Everywhere
I looked, fire hydrants. I’m in the middle of a fire hydrant forest. Must get out of
this navigational vertigo. I saw a strip of buildings with humans, and I searched for a
phone but was denied. “They’re turned off,” a woman standing by the door of an in-
vestment company said, “they’re off.” I didn’t think about it at the time, but since
when are phones something that get turned off?
Yes, yes, “Bad omen!” you’re saying, as I find myself sealed off in
a concrete extrusion of global capital, grown in a petri dish of low taxes and airport

“ G i v e M e a B o d y , T h e n ”
proximity. This is a place that exists to move practices and knowledges elsewhere,
and yet the phone, that great vector of global movement—“Honey, I shrunk the
world . . .”—was off.
Whose car was this anyway?
I saw the promised orange number in the right-hand corner of
the building that Darwin had foretold, so I breathed some relief and pulled in next
to a white four-wheel drive. A Bronco Blanco, as they said in the O.J. Simpson trial.
Cryonicists would have four-wheel drives, I thought. They would always need the re-
liable means of movement that comes with the sudden freezing of bodies and their
constant surveillance and care.
It was a room much like the one at Gentle Dental, a low-budget
dentist I had once submitted myself to while at MIT. I wanted to press my nose
against the glass, see what was beyond the first room, and then a small, bearded man
spotted me and heaved the door toward him.
“Are you Mike?” I asked, somewhat astonished that this person
actually existed in the midst of the hydrants, asphalt, and long, low buildings that
hugged the ground in search of safety from the sudden seismic messages of Southern
California. “No, no,” the man with the wispy beard said, “no.” He gestured toward a
group of rooms that unfurled from the main hallway. “No.”
“We already paid this bill. I’m not paying for electron microscopy
twice.” A tall man with thick, well-cropped gray hair and wire-frame glasses was sur-
rounded by documents, computers, desks gone to office entropy.
“Here’s the person that you were waiting for, Mike.”
Mike Darwin pumped my hand with a real estate grip as we
drifted back toward the front room, floating toward the memories of bad dentistry. I
checked a cavity with my tongue.
The dog, it seemed, had been frozen. Its companion, a friendly
cat named Sam, sprouted a twelve-pin jack from its furry, scabby head, so that it
might be more readable, so that its EEG could be checked at any time, a time in
which the object was to pause time, to freeze a cat or a dog and bring it “up,” as if
nothing had happened. Darwin scratched the cat’s head. “It itches,” he said.
At this point the soundtrack of the image sculpted here becomes
dense with barking. Dogs, lots of them, told Darwin that they were tired of waiting,
waiting for food, water, Frisbees, biscuits. All this waiting.
Darwin told me about Lazarus. He had been “down,” as Darwin
put it, for sixteen minutes. Slowly, his canine body had cooled down to well below

zero, until he was, semiotically speaking, dead. No sign of vitality. Just as slowly,
after an intermezzo, Lazarus was warmed, until all the signs of life returned. Now he
had the run of the lab.
“Our goal,” Darwin said, “Our goal is to get to the point where we
can cool him down, pack him in ice, put him in a casket, and fly him off to Florida.
Then we can offload him to Disneyworld, all the media there, and bring him back.”
“You want to fax the dog,” I said.
“Yeah, fax the dog. Or at least the dog’s life. To fax it we need to
get to six hours, not just sixteen minutes, but I’m a patient man.”
A Fold, Grafting the Future
. . . the rise of situations to which one can no longer react, of environments with which
there are now only chance relations . . .
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2:
The Time–Image
Gilles Deleuze, in his multivolume work devoted to the cinema, locates a “mutation”
within cinema, “new signs invading the screen” after the Second World War.2 Deleuze
maps this transformation of the cinematic field not in terms of a shift in the relative
values of a genre, the new technologies associated with the special effect, nor to an
understanding of the shifting relations of cinema to its mode of production. Rather,
Deleuze locates a shift in the concepts through which cinema renders time and move-
ment. The movement-image, for Deleuze, rendered motion through an assemblage
of image/cut/image, one image following another. It did so via the “association of
images,” one image after another, each one crossing the void of movement. Thus in
the movement-image, the assemblage of the film apparatus and the brain yielded
movement through the disjunction of individual frames and shots. Movement, then,
was not given “in” the image, but was instead composed out of the gaps and voids of
the cinematic space, as if the image were moving itself, with periodic moments of
rest. These gaps or cuts were not breaks or additions to the frame or immobile sec-
tions that made up cinema. Instead, Deleuze locates a sequence of shots as an as-
semblage, frames in motion through the production of univocal, unified space that is
traversed by an irreducible movement.
The space covered is divisible, indeed infinitely divisible, whilst movement is
indivisible, or cannot be divided without changing qualitatively each time it
is divided.3

“ G i v e M e a B o d y , T h e n ”
Why is movement itself indivisible? As interruptions of a plane or
space that is smooth, divisible yet full of connection, cuts cannot themselves be cut,
at least not without a change in the character or quality of the cut, a point of transition
that would constitute a different fold of cinematic space. A classical filmic sequence,
then, rhetorically rendered movement through an assemblage of cuts, voids that
garnered their effects through their contiguity with images.
Topologically speaking, then, the movement-image emerged out
of folded images, pockets of movement whose interiority continually referenced the
image or frame that was put into motion. The cut that connects, the movement-image
was riddled with holes but nonetheless formed a chain of commensurables, move-
ments of the same kind that traversed a stable space that would reference them.
With the time-image, the cinematic sign changes in character.
No longer a series, where each image is commensurable with the last on a unified,
divisible plane, the time-image is constituted out of the interstice itself, an inter-
mezzo that begins to have an importance in itself.
The modern image initiates the reign of “incommensurables” or irrational
cuts: this is to say that the cut no longer forms part of one or the other
image, of one or the other sequence that it separates and divides.4
This transformation of the cinematic sign—from a regime that
renders formal linkages of images to one that comports a continual break, “the irra-
tional cut” that is grafted as a cut and not a becoming-linked—reverberates with the
entire assemblage of subjects and machines that composes cinema. If early cinema and
the production of the movement-image demonstrated the “impower of thought”—
with the brain’s “filling in” of movement through the flicker of the image, one could
not look away—the time-image sometimes provokes the impower or even the ends
of subjectivity, a subjectivity that is only about to occur, an algorithmic subjectivity
whose instantiation is ongoing and subject to sudden transformation. In his discus-
sion of the “media effect” produced by German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg,
Deleuze notes that the “interstice” between the visual and the sonic renders not sub-
jects entranced to cinematic Caligari cabinets but rather maps a landscape of infor-
mational complexity:
The disjunction, the division of the visual and the sound, will be specifically
entrusted with experiencing this complexity of informational space. This goes
beyond the psychological individual just as it makes a whole impossible: a
non-totalizable complexity, “non representable by a single individual,” and
finds its representation only in the automaton.5

This invasion of the screen by new signs, then, marks more than the emergence of a
new style or possibility in cinema; it maps a transformation of the effects of represen-
tations and the subjects that would bear them. While the movement-image, with its
kernel of transformation buried “between” each image, mimed and perhaps periodi-
cally constituted a subject of interiority whose depths were unrepresentable but po-
tent, true, and secret, the time-image, with its incessant interruptions of itself, invests
the intermezzo of the image with a positivity and complexity that is “beyond” the
subject. Not just “between” images as an interval that exceeds the inside and outside
of any image, the time-image is in some sense “between” subjects, neither inside nor
outside but resonating in a space of informational complexity that resists any interior-
ity. No longer referenced to an image that would engulf it and force it to refer to a
stable, commensurable space of movement, the time-image dwells less as a cut that
forms an outside for the interiority of an image than in the Möbius topology of a cut
that is neither inside nor outside but in a differential fluctuation. Here the cinema is
less a parade of images to the sovereign spectator, riddled with flickers, than a relent-
less production of an intermezzo, the image of time in its positivity, composed of the
entire assemblage of spectator, film stock, screen, and camera, an assemblage which
can only be endured as an actualization:
Everything can be used as a screen, the body of the protagonist or even the
bodies of the spectators; everything can replace the film stock, in a virtual
film that now only goes on in the head, behind the pupils. . . . A disturbed
brain-death or a new brain which would be at once the screen, the film stock
and the camera, each time a membrane of the outside and the inside?6
Hence, for Deleuze the time-image fosters a body that lives through this intermezzo,
is the intermezzo, always waiting:
The body is never in the present, it contains the before and the after, tiredness
and waiting. Tiredness and waiting, even despair are the attitudes of the body.7
Thus the “interstice,” the interval that constitutes the time-image,
marks an anticipatory period of waiting, but it is not a preparation for a link that is
to come. Instead, the fissures comported by the time-image are waiting only on
themselves, pulsing with a contingency that would traverse them, shattering each
gap anew with another interval, another cut whose link can only be made of contin-
gency. Neither before nor after but becoming, the interval set free in this manner af-
firms time as an exteriority, an unprecedented contingency:

“ G i v e M e a B o d y , T h e n ”
We no longer believe in a whole as interiority of thought—even an open
one; we believe in a force from the outside which hollows itself out, grabs us
and attracts the inside. We no longer believe in an association of images—
even crossing voids; we believe in breaks which take on an absolute value and
subordinate all association.8
The efficacy of Deleuze’s claims for this cinematic shift could
and should be interrogated in terms of their capacity to map problems and tensions
in the history of cinema, and yield encounters with images that provoke events other
than the habitual recuperation of subjectivity. But the emergence of this intermezzo,
this fracture, this break, as a semiotic operation of the cinema is involved in more
than cinema.
A theory of cinema is not “about” cinema, but about the concepts that cinema
gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts correspond-
ing to other practices, . . . It is at the level of the interference of many prac-
tices that things happen, beings, images, concepts, all kinds of events. The
theory of cinema does not bear on the cinema, but on the concepts of the
cinema, which are no less practical, effective, or existent than cinema itself.9
Deleuze noted above that it was only with the figure of the “automaton” that the ex-
cessive topology of informational complexity could be rendered. If the time-image,
as a practical concept that operates in and through cinema, is caught up in the inter-
ference of other concepts and their practices, it is perhaps “informatics,” with its re-
lentless spawning of the intermezzo space of networks, with which this concept can
be mapped.
Becoming Corporeal: From “That’s All There Is” to
What Will It Become?
This story of Lazarus narrates a transformation in the concepts and sciences of “life,”
transformations that transport the bodies of organisms as materially as a 747 to
Orlando. More than a becoming-machine of the organism, this retooling or “refigur-
ing” of life provokes double takes on the becoming-lively of the machine. The recipe
that makes it possible to plan for a future “faxing” of an organism, then, begins with
the command: transform into information.
This transformation of organisms—and their deaths—into infor-
mation, of course, has all the hallmarks of a narrative of nostalgia. Once upon a time,
so the story goes, biology concerned itself with the dynamic vitality of organisms, an

interiority of struggle that offered a density and thickness to the object of the scientific
gaze, a density that is all but evacuated by this rendering of organisms into code.
Thus molecular biologist Walter Gilbert narrates this shift in the articulation of life
as a movement from organisms to databases:
In the current paradigm. . . . The “correct” approach is to identify a gene by
some direct experimental procedure—determined by some property of its
product or otherwise related to its phenotype—to clone it, to sequence it,
to make its product. . . . The new paradigm, now emerging, is that all the
“genes” will be known (in the sense of being resident in databases available
electronically).10
This postvital paradigm, then, no longer looks to the body of the organism, its pheno-
type, for the production of truth. Rather, the new knowledges of life will, Gilbert
argues, proceed through the relations of biology’s “new reagent,” information. The
remarkable ascent of the molecular understanding of life—Watson’s “to understand
what life is, we must know how genes act”—emerges through the eclipse of the
organism, the implosion of life into “information.” So too does that other threshold,
death, become a problem of an informatic kind. Ralph Merkle, cryonicist and
cryptographer of postvitality, writes of the new distinction wrought on death by
information:
This true and final death is caused by loss of information, the information
about where things should go. If we could describe what things should look
like, then we could (with fine enough tools, tools that would literally let us
rearrange the molecular structure) put things right. If we can’t describe what
things should look like, then the patient is beyond help. Because the funda-
mental problem is the loss of information, this has been called information
theoretic death. Information theoretic death, unlike today’s “clinical death,”
is a true and absolute death from which there can be no recovery. If informa-
tion theoretic death occurs then we can only mourn the loss.11
The concept of information theoretic death, then, emerges through a recursive blur
of vitality: the becoming-lively of machines, the becoming-machine of evolution.
And Merkle, too, follows the rhetorics of information unto nostalgia and death. If
the loci of life have shifted from organisms to databases, there is nonetheless a para-
doxical remainder of vitality’s story and its nostalgias: “we can only mourn the loss.”
This sudden evacuation of possibility provoked by information theoretic death indi-
cates a limit of algorithmic processes: that non sequitur of physics, irreversibility.

“ G i v e M e a B o d y , T h e n ”
The specter Merkle anticipates mourning is linked to an apparent difference between
physical and biological systems: living systems are continually open to surprise, ir-
reversible changes that can never be “put right,” if only because biological “things”
are less objects than ongoing transformations.12
If irreversibility emerges as a terrifying problem rather than a
remarkable attribute of living systems, it does so at least in part under the influence
of a sequential model of life. Under this regime, information—the sequenced
genome, the diagram of development inscribed by a laser and the ablation of cells,
and the complete “neural circuit” of, say, a worm—becomes represented primarily
as a “sequence,” genetic “actors” understood in terms of the next element in a se-
quence. With the sequenced genome, the genetic “actors” are understood primarily
in terms of what gene product a given sequence gives rise to, cells are traced within
a trajectory of development, the “next cell,” and neural operations are mapped via
the “behavior”—the next action they yield. The “frames” that compose each sequence
are thus comported in terms of their “movement,” a movement that emerges out of
the traversal of a infinitesimally tiny gap, the difference between a gene and its gene
product, one cell and its descendent, and so on. As such, this visualization of living
systems proceeds through an operation of the movement-image, a sequence of images
whose effects emerge out of the association between one moment and the next, mo-
ments themselves traversed by an invisibly actualized difference, life.
The object of molecular biological knowledge rendered here is
thus sought within the frame—the genetic actors—and not in the interval between
frames, the actualization of transformation themselves. These transformations—the
networks of transcription and translation that “read” the “reading frame” of DNA,
and the operations of protein folding that yield three dimensional structures from
sheets of amino acids—become strangely unpredictable supplements to life’s “actor,”
the code. Like the computer algorithms with which they are rhetorically linked,
though, the instantiation of almost any algorithm involves an irreducible event of
becoming: just run it. Hence what is imaged in this high-resolution map of “what
life is” is not the differentiating outburst of evolution known as “life,” but the move-
ment of gene–to-gene product, neural circuit to behavior, movement itself. Life and
corporeality, the transparent body, any organism whatsoever forms the divisible and
invisible substrate upon which such movement transpires, a self-moving image called
“DNA.”13
But if this remarkable resolution frames the organism as tedious
repetition of theories of motility, perhaps Lazarus, in his long pause, is a rendering
of organisms in terms of their irreversible becoming, what they are capable of. It

may seem that this experiment in cryonics is a massive investment of discipline into
the frame, a dog actor who would be recuperated at the end of long journey across a
void, a kind of postvital Lassie come home. As a technology of immortality, nothing
would seem to comprise a more sutured interiority, that wetware of the movement-
image, than the desire to return from the infinite gap of death.
But in “faxing” Lazarus, Darwin comports him as an informa-
tional construct that is put on hold. The entire operation of cooldown, perfusion,
transport, and revival is devoted to a production of what will have been an inter-
mezzo, a space between life and death, inside and outside of time. This intermezzo,
of course, only gets produced as a moment “between” moments of Lazarus, but it is
this pause—sixteen minutes or six hours—that garners importance “in itself.” The
space between life that makes possible a “faxing” of an organism—a dog reduced to
a readout of information, that readout of information is transformed back into a
dog—is oriented not toward a statement of what is, but involves an experiment into
life’s capacities. Less about an actor than about transformation, a transformation
into information, this cryonics experiment tinkers with life rather than describes it.
Neither inside nor outside life, Lazarus forms a Möbius body. Neither inside time—
the dog is precisely clocked—nor outside it—it continually encounters contingency—
a loss of power, a loss of life—Lazarus indexes the time-image: “Time-images are not
things happening in time, but new forms of coexistence, ordering, transformation.”14
And yet “all the media will be there,” and “there” will be Disney-
world and not Disneyland. How long will it take to notice? When will this difference
occur, and how will its difference be imaged, imagined? At once, this intermezzo is
territorialized into movement—the second part of our Lazarus algorithm would
read: transport to Orlando. It is as if Lazarus’s pause, spreading from the middle, can
only bear representation, or perhaps narration, as a journey in space. But the precise
character of the journey provokes not movement from one image of America to an-
other, but simulacra repeating, echoing each other.15 This evacuation of movement
foregrounds the positivity and materiality of time, the complex intermezzo of frenzy,
aircraft, video, and terrible, extraordinary cold. A six-hour trip to a future of itself,
the journey from Disneyland to Disneyworld becomes less the traversal of a continent
and more the repetition—or a fold—of an entire field of automata, those machinic
characters that can bear, Deleuze claims, the representation of informational com-
plexity. It is, perhaps, as if Lazarus blinked an extraordinarily slow blink in Pirates of
the Caribbean, immobilized by the cold. Lazarus does not so much move from Disney-
land to Disneyworld as he erupts in Disneyland and Disneyworld, an assemblage
of simulacra networked with the frozen flesh of Lazarus. Moving so fast that he is

“ G i v e M e a B o d y , T h e n ”
motionless, Lazarus will have embarked on time travel, a journey toward Disneyland
of the near future, six hours from “the present.” Here the difference of the future, as
in all time-travel scenarios, is too great to be born by representation; the future
“traveled” to must be only slightly divergent from the present, a divergence much
less than the geographical distance between Anaheim and Orlando, and incalculably
more than nothing.
The importance of the irrational cut, the time-image, as a way of
mapping the contours of contemporary corporeality, resides less in its truth or fidelity
than in its complicity with futures. For the intermezzo, in its grafting of the imper-
ceptible if not absent organism to the future, poses the question, the problem, and
the ecstasies of becomings proper to the body, what bodies are capable of, and there-
fore what they may become, then. “Give me a body then”16 is Deleuze’s formula for
a philosophical reversal, one that takes the body not as a “resistance” to thought, but
as that which provokes thought, puts it into flight, forces us to think. Biological
bodies, then, even as they are networked and even imploded by information, become
occasions not just for the astonishing connections of a so-called biological multi-
plicity and its alterities. They also reek of rhizomatic entanglements with capital, the
massive and material exteriority of this technological déjà vu, hurtling toward Disney-
land. Whose car was this, anyway?

F I V E

Waiting and suspense are essential characteristics of the masochistic experience . . .
Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty
October 12, 1998
it seemed likely that I would begin working on the interview in the near future.
Sometime soon. A Friday would be best. At some blurred point in the past, Thursdays
had become consumed, gnawed away by teaching and the anticipation of a weekend.
Friday was like a relief from the continual imaging of a future that wasn’t so immi-
nent, instantaneous. In a few days, I would have the capacity to be worked over by
the delays and relays of writing.
Without a doubt, this is the source of my flight, this uncanny
overtaking, even possession, that seems integral to ecologies of writing. Some per-
verse fidelity to my research demands that I be transformed by it. This is not exactly
something I can do on purpose.
October 15, 1998
I have changed my mind about the interview. It would make more sense to do it by
phone. All of my hopes of frequent flyer miles evaporate. I’ll make some coffee, pick
up the phone.
“Remains to Be Seen”:
A Self-Extracting Amalgam

Robert Ettinger is the founder of the Cryonics Institute in Clin-
ton Township, Michigan. For 28,000 dollars (US), Ettinger’s institute will freeze and
store your legally dead body in preparation for future revival. CI is one of several
players in this relatively new field of customer service. Alcor, now in Arizona but
formerly of California, is the largest cryonics care provider,1 while CryoCare, of
Rancho Cucamonga, California, is the most recent upstart to compete for the cryon-
ics patient. The numbers involved with cryonics are not huge—the number of bod-
ies and/or heads frozen is probably in the hundreds rather than thousands—but as
with the value of Amazon.com shares, the business of evaluating the relative worth
of cryonics organizations is predicated on unprecedented future success.
If origins matter—and in the practice of cryonics, this is a matter
of some dispute—then Ettinger has the credentials. In 1962 Ettinger, a college
physics and math instructor, published The Prospect of Immortality, a text that proved
to be a recipe for generations of cryonics patients.2 Ettinger offered a vision of the
future as one of plenitude, plasticity, and wealth. While the present was to be enjoyed
at all costs, cryonics offered a future not just of immortality, but of differentiation.
Freezing was a practice of becoming—even English professors would be transformed,
as human culture would undergo a change in kind associated with immortality:
It is true that we still read Beowulf, and the Iliad, and Hamlet, and many
scholars blithely assume that these and similar works will remain in our cul-
ture forever. But in the last thirty or forty thousand years, the supposed
tenure of modern man on earth, cultural changes have been relatively small,
and biological changes virtually nil. In the next few centuries, the changes
will be incomparably greater. . . I am convinced that in a few hundred years
the words of Shakespeare, for example, will interest us no more than the
grunting of swine in a wallow. (Shakespearean scholars, along with censors,
snuff grinders, and wig makers, will have to find new, perhaps unimaginable
occupations.)3
October 24, 1998
I began researching cryonics more than five years ago. You’d think I would have
signed up by now. I had run into some stuff on cryonics in a newsgroup on nano-
technology that I regularly read, sci.nano.4 Somehow the creation of self-reproducing
molecular machines was involved in the forecast for cryonic revival. The future capac-
ity of these critters to assemble copies of everything promised much for those who
were, as Ettinger put it, on this side of the freezer. Ralph Merkle, a nanotechnology

“ R e m a i n s t o B e S e e n ”
researcher at Xerox PARC and cameo brand name in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond
Age,5 offered the cryonics community the notion that the frozen cryonic corpse was
a scrambled text waiting for decryption. Nanotechnological appliances of the future
were the likely exegetes. Once I realized that contemporary cryonicists conceptualized
bodies as ensembles of information that could be decoded, I was hooked. Cryonics, I
realized, was positively mainstream. Cryonicists were, to be sure, the last gasp of an
organismic biology—they thought the body mattered enough to freeze it!—but
they nonetheless were sensible enough to accord with contemporary molecular biol-
ogy, which tells us that living systems are just interesting configurations of informa-
tion.6 I wondered if they were interesting enough to experiment on.
October 24, 1998
I had assumed, at first, that Ettinger was dead. This isn’t really a fair assumption,
since it’s only 1998, thirty-six years after Ettinger’s first book. I, after all, through
some rather elaborate Rube Goldberg devices, have survived since 1963, so why as-
sume otherwise for Ettinger?
Maybe it was the spooky character of the research. I’ll admit to
being a bit panicked by my early readings in cryonics. For it is one thing for Richard
Dawkins or Gattaca to describe the lives of human beings as networks of information.
But cryonicists were devoted less to description than to practice. They treated human
bodies as elaborate memory structures, and devoted much of their lives to the prepa-
ration and invention of these treatments. They took the news of the informatic evo-
lution of humans to mean: To Be Continued. In this scenario—although these are
not the terms of the cryonicists—it’s easy to feel a little bit haunted.
Merkle’s “Cryonics, Cryptography, and Maximum Likelihood
Estimation,” for example, suggests that our contemporary or “clinical” declarations
of death are premature. It ain’t over, Merkle suggests, until the very memories of the
deceased—corporeal and collective7—are scrambled, a state, as discussed in the pre-
vious chapter, Merkle characterizes as “information theoretic death.”
This persistence in the course of physical death—the tendency
for the properly treated body to memorialize its own life, to testify to its own dis-
ease—renders future information even when it ceases to be capable of any ongoing
self-maintenance or autopoiesis. In short, it becomes a sign for the future, a recipe
for “put[ting] things right.”
But for whom does this dead body become a sign? The project
of maintaining the clinically dead body is now outsourced to others. If the ongoing

process of pushing entropy around is too much for the individual, a clinically dead
individual who excels only at nothing, could not a community—of cryonicists—
collectively manage the entropy?
This subcontracting makes a bit unclear just who is doing the
living in these cryonic ecologies. Imagine working for corporations whose workforce
and profits are tied to such continual maintenance, to live for others who can’t do it
on their own. Perhaps this will be one of those “unimaginable occupations” about
which Ettinger prophesied.
No wonder I thought he was dead.
October 26, 1998
I had once e-mailed Ettinger with praise for Prospects. I can’t find it now—that was
three or four hard disk crashes ago. When I had first seen ettinger@aol.com on a
message from CryoNet, it was like a brush with greatness—could it really be the
cryonics pioneer? And of course there’s always something slightly uncanny about
meeting the author of an impressive book—it’s difficult to avoid seeing the author as
the double of her work. Novelist William Gaddis nicely reversed the polarity of this
description when he diagnosed the “passion” for meeting writers and artists to supple-
ment the encounter with the work. “What do they expect? What is there left of him
when he’s done his work? What’s any artist but the dregs of her work?”8
Subject: Interview
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 12:01:14 -0500
From: Richard Doyle <mobius@psu.edu>
Organization: Hybrids Unlimited
To: Ettinger@aol.com
Dr. Ettinger:
You may recall that I wrote you about a year ago inquiring into
your current work. I am an assistant professor of English at Penn State
University, and I am interested in the relationships between science fic-
tion and scientific research. I have written a book, “On Beyond Living,”
on Stanford University Press, that details the historical transforma-
tions in our understandings of living systems, focusing on the history
of molecular biology. I have been researching cryonics for several years
now, and am interested in talking with you about your current work,
your reflections on the history of cryonics and the future of the human
body. I would like to interview you sometime in the next month if that

“ R e m a i n s t o B e S e e n ”
would be possible. Would you be agreeable to such a chat? I would very
much appreciate any time you could give me.
Best Wishes,
Richard Doyle
December 31, 1998
9:45 AM
In the beginning was the busy signal. Along with a hiss that an-
nounced the low cost of my recording and playback apparatus, I heard a refrain that
told me to wait. All circuits are busy. Try again later.
Already, there had been much waiting. A light, chalky snow dusted
the early morning traffic of the college town where I live, enough of a coating to enjoy
a periodic fishtail as I negotiated the Wal-Mart parking lot, a wide, flat pool of asphalt
bordered by a bagel franchise and a video store. There are two Wal-Marts in State
College, Pennsylvania—the first had, for some reason, proven to be the highest
grossing store in the country, so a copy of it was installed north of town, near the
Barnes and Noble/Starbucks that had sprouted in the proximity of a six-screen multi-
plex. The original Wal-Mart was closer to campus, where I sometimes work, so I
pointed the truck between McDonalds and Bi-Lo Foods, the wipers on low to clear
away the meager but persistent snowfall.
The aisles, of course, were laid out differently in each Wal-Mart,
and I could never, fortunately, remember which was which. Someone greeted me at
the door, rendering customer service. “Happy New Year.”
The Magnavox/Phillips AQ6581 stereo radio cassette player has
Dynamic Bass Boost (DBB) and automatic stop.
9:17 AM
I remember to buy some batteries. My usual strategy of cannibal-
izing AA cells from a VCR remote won’t do—it’s a forty-five-minute interview, if I
remember correctly. I buy the two-pack.
I am sliding, sliding my Mellon Bank card through a beveled
slot—it’s called “swiping”—but the display continually insists that the card is “un-
readable.” And here I was just paid. The guy who is working the counter—mid-thir-
ties, bearded, the thick body of an ex-football player—blames it on the cold. “The
magnetic stripe gets brittle.” He tries warming it in his palms and reswiping, but no
dice. There are sixteen dollars in my wallet and I unfold and smooth them onto the

counter while the tape player package and the batteries in their tester modules are
dragged over the red laser. “Happy New Year,” I offer. “Party on,” I am reminded.
“Crank it up.”
9:35 AM
Due to budget efficiencies in the context of a billion-dollar fund-
raising campaign at my university, the heat is off in my office. I have attacked the
tape player packaging with some old scissors, and I followed the diagram inscribed
on the battery compartment, clicking and springing the cells into place. The package
claims that they are good until March 2003, probably longer if I keep them in the
fridge. Headphones on, I “play.”
9:36 AM
This silence is worrisome. I don’t even get any hiss. No LED
announces the use of power. I go into troubleshooting mode.
9:40 AM
After checking the headphone connection—which was loose—
and trying different strategies of battery placement, I realize that I have forgotten
about the tape. Hiding in my back pocket, it revealed itself only when I sat down in
my ancient office chair in a clever, almost Zen effort to relax and locate the flaw in
my troubleshooting. I think I heard something snap.
9:44 AM
The tape is extracted from its case and found to be unharmed. A
short segment of tape has strayed from its housing, an errant fold that is easily re-
moved by turning one of the cassette’s “eyes” with a pencil. With great anticipation,
I again “play.” I recall, with some trepidation, the plot of the Evil Dead sequence of
horror films. A group of college kids rent an old cabin for the weekend. Inside, they
happen upon an old tape recorder with some recorded tapes. They hit play. . .
9:45 AM
The dial tone fools me into thinking that I am on the phone.
Somebody else is dialing. A busy signal, one of those fast ones that seems to indicate
that you have made a dialing error. I try to hang up. Can’t do it.
9:45 AM
Mostly, I hear breathing. My own.9 On the fourth ring, a woman,
past sixty, answers the phone.
“Hello?”

“ R e m a i n s t o B e S e e n ”
“Yes, hello, this is Richard Doyle, I am calling from Penn State
University to speak with Robert Ettinger. We have been in e-mail contact.”
Some breathing, probably not my own. How can silence render
perplexity with such precision? “What do you want?”
“We had discussed doing a phone interview.”
“Honey! It’s a fella from a university.”
I told him my name again, told him about the e-mail discussion
we had had. “I am doing an essay for a volume on nothing for University of Minne-
sota Press and I wanted to use some snippets from an interview.”
“You were going to call at noon?”
“Yes, oh, I’m sorry, I forgot that Detroit. You want me to call
back in an hour?”
“Could you make it two hours?”
“Yes, fine, I’ll phone you at one PM your time.”
“No, that would be noon my time. Mountain time.”
“What time zone is Detroit in?”
“I’m in Arizona.”10
January 1, 1999
I try the DBB, Dynamic Bass Boost, as I listen to myself redial.
There’s only so much of this stuff I can review without going
into a bit of a panic. What was I thinking? To cite the interview itself, what did I
want? Everything—a stray cough, the sound of me taking a sip of ginseng tea—seems
to be a sign, including my mistake. Will Ettinger take it as one?
It was an understandable error. Unlike my entirely unwarranted
assumption about Ettinger’s mortality, my premise that he lived in Michigan was
based on some solid textual evidence. The Cryonics Institute, as I mentioned earlier,
is located in Clinton Township, Michigan, in interesting but coincidental proximity
to Dr. Jack Kevorkian.11 In addition to being a well-established cryonics provider,
the Institute’s location gives it a singular status. While some earlier cryonics providers
were located in Ohio and Indianapolis, most cryonics organizations today are located
west of the Mississippi.12 I know I would feel better if my freezing—an event whose
contingency cannot be erased, bound as it is to the arrival of legal death—took
place at a facility close to my death. It only makes sense that distance would be a
compelling factor in the choice of a cryonics facility.
So despite all the declarations of the arrival of a “placeless society”
that would accompany the virtualization of labor and value, geography would seem

to matter—the West Coast ecology cultivates more cryonics than elsewhere. Hence
the interest in Ettinger—his Institute, founded in 1976, all concrete, glass, and hor-
izontal—grew at a distance from the informational practices of Silicon Valley, within
wrench-throwing distance of that icon of manufacturing, Detroit.
“I’m taping you right now, I’m taping us. Is that ok?”
“No problem.”
I was thinking, of course, of Linda Tripp, of what becomes of in-
formation when it is grafted into another context, of its essential capacity to, as de-
scribed by Socrates—okay, Plato scripting Socrates—get into the wrong hands.
Clearly, this was not something Ettinger worried about. It was indeed probably
something he couldn’t worry about. Or perhaps it had become something other than
a worry.
I wanted to immediately ask him why he was living in Arizona,
but I knew it was probably for the weather. And with the global retrieval operations
of the Institute, it was good enough to be in hailing distance of the airport. CryoCare,
of Rancho Cucamonga, California, was practically located on the grounds of the
Ontario airport, and, Lazarus knows, only fifteen minutes from Disneyland.
So I didn’t ask him. I also didn’t ask him if he had any children,
what his sign was, if he believed in a monotheistic god. And I didn’t ask him anything
about masochism. Yet.
January 2, 1999
10:40 AM
My disk drive has acquired a strange new hum. I drop some
Norton Disk Doctor on it. It seems to help.
The sound of a phone being picked up seems only hearable if it
is recorded, when you are not listening for it. One seldom hears it from the other
side, the tremendous surprise it installs.
I am even surprised the second time.
“Can you make it two hours?”
“I’m in Arizona.”
It rings, this time twice.
“Sorry for calling earlier.”
“Oh, that’s okay.”
“I just have a number of questions here that you can either be
interested in or not, and we can go from there. How does that sound?”
“Okay.”

“ R e m a i n s t o B e S e e n ”
In addition to Prospect of Immortality, Ettinger has written a kind
of manifesto for life extension, Man into Superman. This 1972 text argued for the re-
search into and deployment of technologies for the eradication of aging. More cru-
cially, Ettinger argued for the use of technology as something other than a remedy
for human ills; he saw technology as a vector for human evolution, something he
dubbed the “transhuman.” In the case of that transhuman practice known as cryonics,
I loved the meditative effect of knowing that in order to evolve, one must rigorously
do nothing for centuries.
“I wanted to start with your notion of the transhuman. As you
may or may not know, there is an emerging school of scholars in literature and the
humanities devoted to fostering something other than the human.”
Inaudible remark.
“I was wondering if you could touch, talk a little bit about what
you see the transhuman as, or what the project is to become transhuman.”
“Well, I don’t have any particular, specific objectives. I’ve men-
tioned a lot of possibilities, in Man into Superman, of course. It’s just a matter of
open-ended progress and individual choice along the way. Well, I suppose there
would have to be some kind of amalgam of community choice and individual choice,
but in any event there will be choices made along the way, and how it will evolve re-
mains to be seen. All we can say is, in the most general sense, that we want to improve
ourselves physically and mentally. As for the course that these improvements take,
we’ll have to find out.”
Amalgam. It sounds like the name of another word, like anagram.
As I listen to it—the Magnavox/Phillips AQ6581 doesn’t have rewind, so I keep flip-
ping it over, fast-forwarding, and flipping—I see a kind of melted mass, as in the end-
ing of Tetsuo, when, in a revolution of pleasure, two men are grafted into a machine.13
The OED tells me, in its tiny print and authoritative way, that I
am right to think of a vague, globular mass that refuses reference and connects one
immediately to the tangential and the aleatory. Amalgam comes from thirteenth-
century alchemy, originally perverse:
“Usually taken as a perversion of L malagma (in Pliny and the
physicians), a mollifying poultice or plaster. . . A soft mass formed by chemical
manipulation.”14
Francis Bacon later extended this use to include “an intimate
(plastic) mixture or compound of any two or more substances.”15 A brain, perhaps?
Something flexible—“plastic,” and capable of variation. And structurally multiple—
it takes at least two to amalgamate.

“That’s exactly what I like about your formulation. As you put it,
it really does remain to be seen. It’s an ongoing, variable process—you don’t take a
target and then try to orient yourself toward it. It’s more a matter of perhaps being
available for variation.” I was swiping some of this from my skewed reading of Lynn
Margulis’s work on symbiosis.
“Well, we certainly know something about what we want to lose.”
Laughter. “Or shed.”
“In the form of handicaps, or built-in disadvantages. Obviously,
we’d all like to improve our memories, our speed of thinking. We want to lose our
vulnerability to disease as far as the physical side of the body is concerned.”
Coughing, then a clearing of the throat, as if he were trying to get
someone’s attention.
“Excuse me. And of course we want to lose our tendencies to ir-
rationality and neurosis and psychosis and skewed emotions and that sort of thing,
and we want to lose, oh for example, some of the physiological reactions in fear, we
want to change fear from something that is essentially counterproductive to some-
thing that, effectively, is just a signal. I mean it can also have bad physiological ef-
fects; people can die of fear.”
“Stress might be another name for that.”
“Yeah, right, stress.”
“I am wondering . . . so you think that mostly this is about shed-
ding or losing attributes of our bodies that are negative? Would that be right?”
“Of course the mental and the physical are intermingled. There’s
no clear line of separation.”
Yet another amalgam. “So you would think quite differently than
uploaders, for example?”16
“I certainly do look forward to positive changes, but as far as up-
loading is concerned, I don’t think that that has even been shown to be a possibility.
I mean there’s a possibility in the sense in that it has not been ruled out, but I don’t
think it’s a possibility in that we know that an electronic system could be aware or
that replicating a person in an electronic system would constitute survival.”
“But we do know that for corporeal instantiations of such a
system?”
“We do know what?”
“But that we do know the criteria of survival for a corporeal sys-
tem, like cryonics?”

“ R e m a i n s t o B e S e e n ”
“No, we don’t even know that, we don’t know what the correct
criteria of survival might be, or even if there is such a thing. Now obviously we have
to proceed on the assumption that we survive on a day-to-day basis in the ordinary
course of events. That may not be true either. But it’s hard to see any alternative to
assuming that it’s true, so we have to assume that.”
“That remains to be seen. But it seems like the presence of the
body is persuasive to you in a way that an electronic system is not, for no other reason
than that we work now.”
“The map is not the territory, a copy is not necessarily the same
thing, we don’t know if isomorphism is enough.”
3:30 PM
In Evil Dead, of course, the tape turns out to be some kind of in-
cantation, decrypted, appropriately enough, from Phoenician tomb inscriptions. As
the tape passes over capstan and playback head and becomes signal, the undead are
summoned. The transduction of the tinny speaker commands them into life. Only
the complete dismemberment of a body possessed by the undead arrests their force—
information theoretic death. The tape may not be the territory—it is not quite itself
the undead—but it certainly has its effects.
In the case of my Sony HF 60 type 1, things were not so simple.
What sort of interview—networked with my fingers, my Powerbook 520, my contin-
ually distracted self—was it summoning?
“You are talking about an attempt to evolve, would you agree
with that? If there’s an ethic, it’s that any opportunity to evolve must be seized.”
I fight off the temptation to go back to the OED, our codebook,
for “seize.” All I know is that when a motorcycle, for example, somehow loses its oil,
the pistons expand from the friction and heat, swelling until they can no longer move.
My friend Bob Felmey had seized his Yamaha, skidding suddenly and getting tossed
over the bars. I won’t even get into what would be involved with an evolutionary
seizure.
“Well, yes, we have to look at our options. The goal is to be
somebody improved over what we are now.”
“Well, one of the ways we might become is in fact to overcome
individuality. Not to drag Nietzsche into it—he is, after all, dead—but Nietzsche
saw individuality as a kind of symptom. In this context, to become transhuman would
involve inventing new forms of relation, new forms of thought that are something

besides ‘autonomous’ or ‘individual.’ What remains to be seen is how good the indi-
vidual form is for inventing or surviving the transhuman.”
“Well, as you know, it’s a common theme in sci-fi, some people
would say that we are already communities, that the individual organism, as we
think of it today, is actually a community.”
Yes, yes, literature, sci-fi, pop culture as the software of a commu-
nity based not on identity—who agrees about what they read?—but about the ca-
pacity to be affected by others, even if that other be a horror film. Somewhere in the
background is typing. I’m pretty sure that I closed the door to my office when I
taped the interview, but it could be coming from a colleague’s office or it might be in
the background. A typewriter in Ettinger’s home. What is it typing? More sci-fi?
“Are you thinking of people like Minsky, Society of Mind?17 What
do you think of that idea?”
Ettinger reminds me that he has written about something called
the “self circuit,” what he takes to be the ground of being. Such a conception is
closer to the Ouroborous—a snake swallowing its tail, a homeostatic mechanism—
than to a swarm.
“So we have something like this, as a vague suggestion, that it is
a standing wave—coughing—responding in various ways to stimuli of various kinds.”
A throat clearing. “If that’s true, whether that could be duplicated in some sort of
community mind or hive mind—cough—that remains to be seen.” Coughing. “I’m
sorry, I’ve got to get a cough drop.”
Coughing. That noisy phone silence, where any trace of sound signals a
return to the phone.
Has he forgotten me? I feel regret, as if I had ignored the physical
toll it extracts to talk and talk and talk.
Sixty-five seconds have gone by. It sounds like he is about to
talk. I respond to the silence. I clear my throat. There is more coughing.
At ninety seconds, “Hello?” Silence. “Oh . . .” False alarm.
“I am sorry to keep you waiting.”
Surprise. “Oh, no, no problem.”
“Yes, I was about to say that many philosophers and investigators
tend to assume that it is not only desirable but possible to find the answers to what
they are looking for on the basis of what they already know. Unfortunately that’s not
the way the world works. We have to enlarge our database by experiment before we
are even in a position to achieve some of those goals of understanding, particularly
in biology. The question of criteria of survival and so on is not a philosophical ques-

“ R e m a i n s t o B e S e e n ”
tion, at least not entirely, and not in the sense that the older philosophers thought.
It’s both a philosophical and a biological question.”
Again, I am thinking of the compound mass, amalgam. I like the
way Ettinger respects the sheer difference of the future. In a way, cryonics—that
rigorous operation of nothing—involves a disciplined willingness to be surprised, an
involvement with the future based on what is not only unknown, but, in the present,
unknowable. Bundled with, compounded by, the future, cryonics involves continual
and uncertain waiting.
January 4, 1998
9:30 AM
By now the cold had intensified. Those dusty flakes had become
gobs of sleet. An icy rubble littered the roadside as I foolishly pedaled my bike toward
campus, frostbite creeping up on my digits. I have a new theory about why cryonics
is more popular in California.
The batteries are starting to run down on the Phillips/Magnavox
AQ6581. I confess that I have been listening to something besides Ettinger. William
S. Burroughs collaborated with Material to produce a spoken word-cum-musical
amalgamation based mostly on The Western Lands, his last novel. Burroughs’s late
work is intensely concerned with immortality, but Burroughs located a recipe for
immortality distant from the usual understanding of an eternal repetition of the
same—Ettinger’s “it would be enough simply to continue to live for a few centuries
the same kind of life I’m living now, that would be just great.” Instead of a sturdy
continuity, Burroughs sought to practice an immortality for “soft machines”—a rad-
ical increase in the capacity for mutation:
Immortality is prolonged future and the future of any artifact lies in the direc-
tion of increased flexibility, capacity for change and ultimately mutation.
Immortality may be seen as a by-product of function: “to shine in use.” Muta-
tion involves changes that are literally unimaginable from the perspective of
the future mutant. . . . Mutation is not a matter of logical choices.18
Ettinger’s voice was still there—fainter, a half-octave lower
maybe, but there. We talked about the possibility—following up on the idea of indi-
viduals as communities, swarms—that Ettinger’s “self circuit” could be distributed—
centerless and made of connection rather than location. Ettinger said it remained to
be seen.

“Well, it raises the question of what you would freeze. I mean it
could be that this basis of identity is not even located, strictly speaking, in the body.
It could be an ecological event.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“Well,” now I am coughing, “most organisms we consider as
emerging out of an ecology. They evolve not as individuals but in relation to other
organisms. Since I assume that the self-circuit evolved, then the question arises whether
or not this ‘self’ can be localized in an individual human body or if it is an event that
emerges in an ecology.”
Ettinger wasn’t having any of it. “Well, no, I certainly cannot see
any way that one could arrive at the conclusion that I don’t exist in isolation.”
Silently, I try to think of a way to bring Ettinger to exactly that
conclusion. It turns out that this silence might just have done the trick.
“Now, of course, there are hints in physics that vaguely suggest
that people may be connected, I’m sure you have seen a lot of these recent reports
that indicate that there are so-called quantum entanglements between any two systems
that have ever interacted, and some people interpret that to mean that any two systems
no matter how widely separated, if they ever interacted in the past, they are still con-
nected physically, through quantum entanglements. That leads to some very vague
and very distant speculation that people also could be entangled with each other,
somehow, but it is extremely vague so far.”19
“Yes, emphasis on the ‘somehow,’ probably.”
Laughter. More sound of typing.
I take the tape out of the AQ6581, searching it for signs of entan-
glement. The fold had not returned. “Somehow,” Ettinger was implying, we were
now, possibly, entangled. I would just have to wait and see. I had forgotten to ask
about the “archive” question—cryonicists store tapes and CD-ROMs along with
their bodies to “remind” them who they are upon revival. I would send a copy to
him for the freezer.
2:30 PM
How long does it take for a man to realize that he does not, cannot, want what he wants?
William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands
I ask Ettinger what he thinks of science fiction, what its role was
in the ongoing practice of building cryonics. I knew from the introduction to The
Prospect of Immortality that he had published his own science fiction, (“The Penulti-

“ R e m a i n s t o B e S e e n ”
mate Trump,” Startling Stories, March 1948) and that science fiction pioneer Hugo
Gernsback had influenced him as a child. After trading examples of cryonics in liter-
ature—I forgot Frederik Pohl, Ettinger left out Philip K. Dick—he said something
that surprised me. Ettinger claimed that science fiction actually had a negative effect
on cryonic practice. He confessed that his own inquiries were spurred by a response
to science fiction, but he worried that cryonics’ fictional representation often con-
vinced people it was indeed fantasy. It made them forget that cryonics is possible.
Since I think of cryonics as, at least in part, a fan practice of science fiction, I listened
and relistened to this one several times. Hard on the batteries.
“We’re talking about science fiction as a way of experimenting
with cryonics, with making it thinkable, even marketing it.”
“I have often had the opposite thought, that, as far as science fic-
tion is concerned, that there has been a negative effect. There’s what I call the inoc-
ulation effect. When people read about something over a long period of time in the
context of fiction, then they assume it is fiction.”
Laughter.
“People have been reading about it, or seeing movies about it for
so long that the net result in their minds is that “this is fiction.” The cryonics orga-
nizations, not ourselves but Alcor for example, for a long time would send delegations
to science fiction conventions, set up booths and try to make sales, and the results
were abysmal.”
How would Merkle’s cryptographic scheme deal with this prob-
lem, the “inoculation effect”? If the rigorous future decoding of the scrambled text
of the body relied on the premise that, with freezing, such a body was rendered
more readable, how would any such protocol deal with the problem of fabulation
that Ettinger was gesturing toward here, the tendency of texts to continually mean
something else? Whereas science fiction texts aren’t, on Ettinger’s terms, “referring”
to cryonics at all—they are creating possible worlds in which cryonics operates, not
representing cryonics in the present—they nonetheless seem to do so continually:
they refer to cryonics as fictional, they rigorously produce a sense of cryonics’ false-
hood. Given this, after “a long time”—for by any account, cryonics must remain sci-
ence fiction for a long time—who would be able to take a cryonic corpse seriously?
Maybe there will indeed be work for English professors.
3:45 PM
The batteries are really low now. I try to conserve them by rewind-
ing by hand, with a pencil through the left eye of the cassette. As I do so, I can see

the tape loosen inside, form a fold, then snap back taut. I don’t like the stress on the
tape, but I’ve got to finish. Today.
I ask him if he thinks our concepts of death are less mutable
than our understandings and practices of sexuality. I’m still trying to muster the
nerve to ask him about cryonic sexuality. More about that later.
“We have seen great change in the way in which we view sexuality
but relatively little change in the way we view death. I suppose there’s a good reason
for that. Do you think that there is something about death in American culture that
is particularly intractable?”
“Well, we have lived with death for thousands of generations, so
the survivors are those who have at least the capacity for coming to terms with
death, which is another way of saying that people have these built in mechanisms,
either individual or social, communal, that allow or possibly even compel them to
come to terms with death.”
I am breathing really loudly now. The rhetorician in me loves
“living with death,” as if it were some annoying if incessantly absent neighbor that,
in the end, one just had to accommodate oneself to. I realize that anticipation is the
practice of the moment—what else could “living with death” entail besides being
capable in the future of mourning?—so I try to introduce my question about
masochism.
“I’m trying to think about the effect of preparing to be frozen,
the effect of cryonics on someone who is thinking about being frozen. I am thinking
about it in the context of some of your discussions of sexuality in Man into Superman,
where you foresee ‘A perpetual grapple, no holes barred . . . continuous state of mul-
tiple orgasm. (Of this, more later.)’20
“What I think is so remarkable about that is the way in which de-
ferral itself—‘of this, more later’ is an important component of describing the “per-
petual” or immortal character of this sexuality. Indeed, in some sense it is a sexuality,
this practice of deferral. I wonder if what it means to be a cryonicist is to experience . . .
to do deferral differently than others. We all anticipate our deaths in some ways—”
“Well, possibly, let me say at least one thing before I forget it. I
think there’s going to be a substantial change in the relatively near future when people
begin to take seriously the thought that their grandchildren, maybe even their chil-
dren aren’t going to die of old age. It’s one thing to think of yourself as just another
chain of generations, and that that’s part of the eternal scheme, but if it starts to
dawn on you that you might be one of the last generations of dinosaurs, that’s a little
bit different.”

“ R e m a i n s t o B e S e e n ”
“What do you think that would be like, to be one of the last gen-
erations of dinosaurs?”
“Well, I don’t think people would be happy to know that they’re
going to die, but their children and grandchildren won’t.”
“They’ll be jealous?”
“They’ll be jealous and they won’t think of themselves anymore
as part of an infinite succession of generations, and they won’t think of themselves as
honored in their turn, as they honor previous generations, to the extent that they
do.”
“It would be a kind of complete forgetting.”
“Yes, it will dawn on them, that, essentially. . .”
January 5, 1999
What characterizes masochism and its theatricality is a peculiar form of cruelty. . . the
specific freezing point, the point of idealism realized.
Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty
Ice, it turns out, creates linkages, even hospitality. I’m walking from the parking
deck to my office. I need to finish up a few things, print it out. The AQ6581 still
chugs along, and our slightly slurred voices divert me from the cold of the walk.
“So can you respond to the notion of deferral? It seemed like in
your discussion of sexuality, that what seemed pleasant about that sexuality was that
it could be deferred, it would never be over in some sense.”
I certainly wasn’t being clear. Not everyone connects the use of
technologies to an understanding of desire. I was try to figure out how to decode
this concept, to connect it to something Ettinger already does.
“I’m afraid that I am getting this tickle back in my throat.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Would a glass of water help?”
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to stop for today.”
“Well, I hope you are okay.”
“I’m fine. Sometimes it happens when I talk for a while.”
“Thank you very much, I hope to talk with you again soon.”
“Yes, we can talk another time. You’re welcome.”
“Bye-bye.”
Over the past few months, the landscape of Central Pennsylvania
has been littered with figures whose presence in this narrative would effectively

dramatize my encounter with Robert Ettinger. There was even an ice sculpture con-
test on New Year’s Eve, part of an anti-alcohol, family-entertainment New Year cele-
bration sponsored by my town. Templates were drawn on huge, blank sheets of
paper, detailed schematics grafted to slabs of ice through the very adhesion of the
cold. A group of men with chain saws carved the lines with their screaming, frenzied
blades, while others watched as vague, glistening forms emerged, dripping. But
that’s another horror film.
All of the other ice—forged from a slushy muck of salt and anti-
freeze that was finally arrested by the deepening, increasingly painful cold—pre-
serves a more diverse array of singular moments, events not usually linked. A pack of
matches, its cover unreadable, flaps out from a berm of chunked ice. There are still
oak leaves, flaking from the cold, scattered across the expanses of asphalt scoured
from the rubble. Headphones on, listening to the new sound of Ettinger’s absence, I
slip on a patch of ice, two steps without traction, doing my best Chaplin, and I am
down.
And the cold is here now, for a long time. This amalgam fuses an
ecology whose contingent order remains to be seen.

S I X

...more life, fucker!
Blade Runner
why respond with such an outrageous demand, an expletive that, if Nixon had said
it within his relentlessly taped Oval Office, would be deleted from any transcript?
Why this demand from a machine?
It is not so clear these days what a machine is, exactly. The trans-
formations of the life sciences and its cultural ecology that I have attempted to nar-
rate thus far have turned the organism/machine opposition into a smudge, the topol-
ogy of which I have described as “postvital.” No longer a sovereign site of interiority,
a vital inside that struggles with an inanimate outside, organisms in the contemporary
life sciences become moments in an evolutionary syntax, nodes in an network not of
“vitality” but of information. More than a becoming-machine of the organism, this
retooling or “refiguring” of life provokes double takes on the becoming-lively of the
machine. “Our machines are disturbingly lively, we ourselves frighteningly inert.”1
Thus the demand from the machine—“more life, fucker”—be-
comes not simply an index of the desires machines have today, but a map of the odd
rhetorical imbroglios of “life” that traverse both contemporary science and science
fiction. A demand from a machine, “more life, fucker” maps the transversal movement
Uploading Anticipation,
Becoming Silicon

of that long infection, “life.” It is this ability of the machine to be the double of life
that “more life, fucker!” articulates, a capacity to simulate that enables such remark-
able production of knowledge about living systems.
This informational nexus between organisms and machines could
be described in two registers. On what we might characterize as the rhetorical plane
of technoscience, living systems themselves “double” or simulate the flow of infor-
mation that enabled the nearly unthinkable expansion of knowledge associated with
molecular biology. Thus the conceptualizations of “life” associated with the meta-
phorics of “code” help craft a set of knowledges to the extent that organisms can sim-
ulate machines. The debt this crafting of knowledges owes to the rhetorical practices
of molecular biology is not easy to evaluate, but one of the rhetorical effects fostered
by the notion of “code,” for example, was mobility: rather than tied to the interior of
a sovereign organism and its life, the essence of an organism was, like any other
code, able to be deployed in any context, deterritorialized.
It is this mobility—the ability of living characteristics to move
from one ecology to another through other than organismic routes—that instantiates
the other register of relations between organisms and machines. If molecular biology
“folded” organisms, rendering them for their codes, moving backward before the
“unfolding” of development, from flesh to its code, this mobile rendering of the or-
ganism also launches a redistribution of vitality, a simulation of life by machines. The
very rhetoric of code that transformed the life sciences allowed the code of life to
find an ecology in silicon, artificial life.
This deterritorialization of life—its connection to milieus other
than carbon—is neither a simple reification nor a reduction. Feminist psychologist
Elizabeth A. Wilson reminds us that a distributed or connectionist notion of cogni-
tion—one in which cognition emerges not from a location but between locations, a
network in which “each unit gains its identity not through any essential characteris-
tics . . . but through its placement in the connectionist architecture”2—offers enor-
mous promise for understanding ecologies of transformation or learning, informatic
economies that are irreducible to a set of rules or algorithms. This connectionist
map of cognition renders a human subject sculpted not from presence but from dif-
ference, an incessant variation whose contingency is directly related to “connected-
ness”—its exposure and relation to something other than itself. So too does a dis-
tributed model of life—in which organisms are effects of acentered networks rather
than privileged locations of vitality—foster the encounter with life which is some-
thing other than an “essence” or a sacred site of interiority.

U p l o a d i n g A n t i c i p a t i o n , B e c o m i n g S i l i c o n
But why the curse associated with the investment of machines with
vitality, “more life, fucker”? If we remember, or deploy some false memory implants
of the sort referenced in this quote’s origin, this demand is directed by an android to
its wetware creator, Tyrell, the ambiguous “father” of the machine. Such a memory
replays the truth of simulacra: they replicate rather than reproduce, proliferating
through an assemblage of repetition and materiality—an entire ecology mobilized
for iteration. Replication is the simulacrum’s habit and habitat. “Fucker” is therefore
not a term of abuse, but an empirical observation about the differing modes of pro-
liferation deployed by simulacra and sexually reproducing organisms respectively;
simulacra are not heterosexual kin, they threaten to float free of their economies or
ecologies of “origin.” As replicators and not reproducers, the “skin jobs” of Blade
Runner threaten not to fuck. Simulacra emerge out of an ecology of neither sex nor
death, and the subsequent representations of dangerous desire—a desire not anchored
in any reproductive economy—is tellingly indexed by the logic of Rachel Ward’s re-
sponse to a test to determine if she is an android: “Mr. Decker, is this a test to deter-
mine if I am an android or a Lesbian?”
This threat—simulation’s ability to overtake or “forge” the orig-
inal and become untethered—provokes the demand for “more life.” Blade Runner
anticipates the contingency of a machine that would float free of the constraints suf-
fered and enjoyed by its creators. As such, androids in the world of Blade Runner have
built-in death “effects,” an off switch that automatically engages after four years, at-
tracting simulacra to the same tired trope that incites Blade Runner’s fleshier charac-
ters—death. Blade Runner is thus less a narrative about the latent vitality of machines
and their proliferating simulacra and more a testimony to the virulence of that human
virus—lack. For in its formulation of “more” life, the android replicates a discourse
in which life is continually found wanting, one in which the future is encountered as
a threatened and entropic depletion of the present.
This evacuation of the present by the future often figures in tales
of exhaustion and forgetting: “We have forgotten the organism. We have forgotten
the body.” Perhaps these mantras bear repeating; the contingent emergence of mol-
ecular and computational thinking is hardly a simple occasion for celebration. Yet if
the implosion of organisms and molecules, computers and bodies, dislocates and dis-
tributes our corporeal and cognitive effects, it does so through an encounter with the
unprecedented, an exteriority whose arrival resounds with more than loss. Through
the veritable deconstruction of the concept of life by molecular biology we have
swapped an essence for becoming; vitality emerges between the nodes of a network,

intermezzos oriented toward the future—“It’s evolving”—but constituted out of
contingency—“what is it becoming?” Less a loss of corporeality than its deterritorial-
ization, the becoming-informatic of life reminds us of the enormous capacities for
difference that are living systems. Each new pragmatics mobilized by a molecular
biology founded on the “secret of life” foregrounds the fact that, to paraphrase Gilles
Deleuze sampling Spinoza, we don’t know what life can do. In short, new configura-
tions of life are new organizations of contingency, other substrates for becoming.
These new morphologies of becoming provoke Deleuze’s inquiry
into the Nietzschean figure of the übermensch. Neither “god” nor “man,” the über-
mensch paradoxically emerges out of new relations to finitude. Deleuze maps this
composition of human morphology in topological terms, describing the historical
emergence of infinity in terms of its capacity to “fold” man, to give humans an “in-
side,” an infinite soul. Deleuze distinguishes this topological form called “man” from
that which emerges from the “superfold”:
It would no longer involve raising to infinity or finitude but an unlimited
finity, thereby evoking every situation of force in which a finite number of
components yields a practically unlimited diversity of combinations. It would
be neither the fold nor the unfold that would constitute the active mecha-
nism, but something like the Superfold, as borne out by the foldings proper to
the chains of the genetic code, and the potential of silicon in third-generation
machines, as well as by the contours of a sentence in modern literature,
when literature “merely turns back on itself in an endless reflexivity.”3
Deleuze describes the emergence of the übermensch not through Foucault’s visual ana-
lytics of the “disappearance” of man but through a topological turning or troping of
man. Crucial to this superfold is its pragmatics—only as a practice does its “unlimited
diversity” come into play. Hence the practices proper to the superfold entail an irre-
ducible contingency—the contingency of enactment. As with Wilson’s analysis of a
distributed cognition, the distributed vitality of the superfold—“the potential of sili-
con”—is irreducible to any set of rules or algorithms, as it “resides” only on an itin-
erary—becoming.
If such contingency organizes the narrative of a potent site of
science fiction—within Blade Runner, the inability to distinguish human from simu-
lacrum is unprecedented, the future itself—it also inhabits contemporary narratives
of technoscience that themselves blur the border between science and fiction—sci-
ence/fiction. Uploading, the future porting of human identity and corporeality to a
noncarbon substrate, is a contemporary utopian narrative of becoming-silicon, a set

U p l o a d i n g A n t i c i p a t i o n , B e c o m i n g S i l i c o n
of rhetorical operations that render the future as “more life.” Copied onto a higher
level instantiation, uploads herald the arrival of a technobody built with the future,
an exfoliation of the brain onto the universe itself. Indeed, physicist Frank Tipler, in
The Physics of Immortality, argues that uploads will eventually engulf the universe.4
Such utopian narratives, announcing a future of plentitude and immortality, figure
the implosion of flesh and silicon as an excess, a transformation of the human ecol-
ogy that promises to materialize infinity, to kill death. What technologies, rhetorical
and otherwise, enable these narratives? How does uploading broker the new align-
ments of information, bodies, and subjectivity and render not loss but transforma-
tion? Aren’t these fuckers simply asking for more lack?
Hacking Lack
We might be tempted to locate an amnesia of the body in any conjunction of com-
puters and human subjectivity. We might emphasize the way in which the discovery
of DNA as a site of memory has, ironically, fostered a forgetting of corporeality.
Critic Scott Bukatman, in his remarkable book Terminal Identity,
narrates precisely such a loss of corporeality in the discourses of science fiction and
cultural theory. As storytellers of the spectacle, Bukatman notes, cyberpunk scribes
allegorize the disappearance, dissolution, or implosion of the body in technoscientific
economies of simulation and informatics. In such regimes, “The body exists only as
a rhetorical figure.”5 This collapse into rhetoricity, where bodies are rendered as occa-
sions for coding, is marked by Bukatman as a loss, a deficit incurred by becoming
postmodern. This lack extends not merely to the increasing devaluation of the experi-
ence of the body—as in the notion of genetic “disease” or the allegedly disembodied
state of cyberspace—it troubles the very ontologies networked with the corporeal
habit of subjectivity. Describing the unmoored character of both postmodern science
fiction and “theory”—the “narratives of terminal flesh”—Bukatman locates yet an-
other lack:
The narratives of terminal flesh offer a series of provisional conclusions
wherein the subject is defined, at different times, as its body, its mind, or some-
times its memory. This proliferation of definitions reveals the absence of de-
finition: our ontology is adrift.6
While Bukatman’s analysis could be coupled with my own claim that the contempo-
rary life sciences have smeared the operations of organisms and machines, his argu-
ment also underscores the sense of loss installed by the mobility of bodies and codes.
But such an analysis—with its revelations of “absence”—functions as more than

nostalgia for the allegedly stable ontologies of the past; it forestalls the affirmations
of multiplicity—drifts—that are also at play in late, late, late capitalist science fiction
and theory. The transformation of a “proliferation” into an “absence” is more than a
theoretical error, an inability to narrate the enormous transformations in subjectivity
and corporeality that Bukatman so admirably relates. Such nostalgia also forestalls
the effects that inhere in the very transformations wrought by the technoscientific
renderings of the body, contingencies that are not merely represented in science fic-
tion and theory but provoked by them. For clearly, these “narratives of terminal flesh”
cannot be simply extracted from the new configurations of bodies and machines
that they render. As Allucquere Rosanne Stone has argued, for example, William
Gibson’s Neuromancer—with its terminal flesh trope of “meat”—became the con-
ceptual currency that supported virtual technology research in the early 1980s.
The critical importance of Gibson’s book was partly due to the way that it
triggered a conceptual revolution among the scattered workers who had been
doing virtual reality research for years . . . the technological and social imag-
inary it articulated enabled the researchers in virtual reality—or, under the
new dispensation, cyberspace—to recognize and organize themselves as a
community.7
Science fiction and theory are thus not merely narrating or “rep-
resenting” transformations of subjectivity and corporeality; as rhetorical softwares
they constitute, discipline, and organize scientific communities with such retoolings
of the body and the self.
Uploading, taken as a practice and not simply an imaginary ideal,
a symptom of ontological loss, becomes what Foucault has characterized as a tech-
nology of the self, a comportment or “fashioning” of subjectivity humans carry out
through “a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts,
conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain
state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”8 These “technologies
of the self” are primarily discursive, as in the confession, where the obligation to
speak the truth about oneself, and to exteriorize it in the act of confession, paradox-
ically constituted the interiority of Christian subjectivity. Foucault linked this con-
fessional discourse with the growing importance of writing to the emerging bureau-
cracy of Rome:
Taking care of oneself became linked to constant writing activity. The self is
something to write about, a thing or an object (subject) of writing activity.

U p l o a d i n g A n t i c i p a t i o n , B e c o m i n g S i l i c o n
This is not a modern trait born of the reformation or of romanticism; it is
one of the most ancient Western traditions. It was well established and deeply
rooted when Augustine started his Confessions.9
Under this rubric, the secret interior of Christian subjectivity—the hidden failure
that must be exposed—is constituted not out of repression but through the productive
rhetorical circuit of confession. In this economy, the subjectivity of the confessor be-
comes a mere node in the discourse network of Christianity, her flesh the materiality
of the writing substrate through which this new soul emerged, was delivered.
But this economy was not of just any character; the discourse
network ran on the tropes of finance. While Seneca envisioned self-examination
through the lens of an audit, “when a comptroller looks at the books,” Cassian writes
through the medium of currency. “Conscience,” the internal simulacrum of the exter-
nalized confessor, becomes “the money changer of the self.” Ruthless in its discrim-
ination and sense of authenticity,
It must examine coins, their effigy, their metal, where they came from. It
must weigh them to see if they have been ill-used. As there is the image of
the emperor on money, so must the image of god be on our thoughts. We
must verify the quality of the thought: This effigy of God, is it real?10
Cassian’s technology of the self is thus haunted by money’s simulacrum, the threat of a
copy without origin. Through the continual “verbalizing” of the self, the subject is ren-
dered and purged of scandalous threats to its imprimatur of originality. Master of its
own double, the self emerges “in the permanent verbalization of all our thoughts. . . .
This verbalization is the touchstone or money of thought.”11 This rhetorical econ-
omy—the persuasive character of money, the verbalization of thought—insured the
possibility of a noble transaction of selfhood, a transaction with and through the
currency of God.
This technology of Christian identity, then, cultivates a trans-
action space for and of subjectivity, a space exterior to the self that would evaluate
and inscribe the self, a subject cultivated through the practices of the market: calcula-
tion, evaluation, verification. This “money changer” self operates in a continual pre-
sent—“is it real?”—and encounters the past only through loss—worn coins, notes
of dubious origin.
This continual composition of the self, in its constant encounter
with the practices of “value,” operates only through an encounter with humans. No
alterity—a material, organismic, or technological familiar—enters into the self’s

habit or habitat. What Foucault characterizes as the “discriminating power” flows
through the face and speech of a “master.”
Even if the master, in his role as a discriminating power, doesn’t say any-
thing, the fact that the thought has been expressed will have an effect of dis-
crimination.12
Hence the discourse that articulates this technology of the self operates as an order,
a command which installs a difference—“discrimination”—as its primary effect.
This difference is a difference of negation. In the cacophony of the confession or the
silence of meditation, discrimination renders a self composed of renunciation. “You
cannot disclose without renouncing.”13 The very matrix of this renunciation is
the space of evaluation that, in the first instance, determines the contours of the
“human”—the tautological ideal of a master in transaction with a subject.
While the fine grain of Foucault’s arguments concerning tech-
nologies of self and their relations to rhetorical practices calls for more inquiry, I
want to map out a crucial characteristic that might help to bring uploading’s differ-
ence into relief. The technologies of self analyzed by Foucault are essentially based
on equilibrium—the confession becomes a discourse franchise on the basis of its
regularities; penitence becomes a repeatable, if asymptotic, “model” of martyrdom.
By contrast, Blade Runner, itself an uploaded version of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep?, features an anticipated, postapocalyptic world where novel
and unpredictable forms of empathy extend primarily to the inhuman.14 This en-
counter with the inhuman or ahuman operates by definition as an itineration rather
than an iteration, a drifting rather than a marching, what Deleuze and Guattari
characterize as a “following” in a discussion of the distinctions between a “royal”
and “minor” science, a discussion I take up earlier in this book. In following, Deleuze
and Guattari locate a response-ability to a milieu, a capacity to be affected by the
finitudes and contours of a given ecology. In this sense, practices of itineration—an
always mobile metallurgy that follows the flow of metal and ore, an ambulant com-
puter science that must always, finally, “run” its code—are constituted out of a con-
tinual encounter with something other than human, an alterity that cannot be mapped
or, by definition, “known” in advance. The structural impossibility of knowing such
singularities in advance is hardly a lack—relations with the inhuman take place as an
encounter rather than an understanding. It is this possibility of forging technologies
of self that are constituted through a regard for an inhuman exteriority that, I will
argue, uploading indexes.

U p l o a d i n g A n t i c i p a t i o n , B e c o m i n g S i l i c o n
More Copies, Fucker: Becoming-Sampled
Unlike the technologies of self described by Foucault, contemporary technologies—
rhetorical and otherwise—provoke something other than an authentic, individuated
self constituted through originality. Writing of the possibility of replicating humans
through cloning, William S. Burroughs characterizes the technologies of identity as
an “illusion,” and urges on the possibilities of multiplicity:
The illusion of separate inviolable identity limits your perceptions and con-
fines you in time. You live in other people and other people live in you; “vis-
iting” we call it and of course its ever so much easier with one’s Clonies . . . I
am amazed at the outcry against this good thing not only from men of the
cloth but from scientists . . . the very scientists whose patient research has
brought cloning within our grasp. The very thought of a clone disturbs
these learned gentlemen. Like cattle on the verge of stampede they paw the
ground mooing apprehensively. . . “Selfness is an essential fact of life. The
thought of human non-selfness is terrifying.” Terrifying to whom? Speak for
yourself you timorous old beastie cowering in your eternal lavatory.15
Burroughs has, of course, been among the most energetic terrorists of multiplicity.
But his affirmation of replication in the context of a herd of lack cattle—more copies,
fucker—marks the possibility that the multiple ontologies of the present yield some-
thing more than a lack of selfhood or humanity. For Burroughs, both the desire for
immortality and the terror of replication emerge out of a bad joke: the self. Less a
foundation than an allergic reaction, the self is for Burroughs a pathetic “swelling”
with no more continuity than “a fever sweat.” As in the “Clonies” example above,
Burroughs gestures toward a distributed identity, one that resides as much in others
as in one’s “own” body. Less an extinction of the self than its deterritorialization,
Burroughs’s self is a becoming. “Terrifying to whom?”
No wonder, then, that Burroughs describes conventional visions
of immortality as wrong. As multiplicities, humans garner their identities through
transformation and adaptation rather than mastery and autonomy. For Burroughs,
the possibilities of cloning are fascinating precisely because they shatter the origi-
nality and authenticity of the ego, and foster new forms of individuation scattered
across bodies. The trick in getting out the hell of Time, as Burroughs would have it,
is to become a transversal “body” broadcast across space. Organ transplantation and
cloning thus become not “vampire schemes” for the overcoming of entropy but in-
stead compose tactics for becoming other, the distribution into space.

The very operation of Burroughs’s writing attempts to provoke
just such multiplicity. The cut up—literally chopping up text and rearranging it—
decomposes the consciousness of the “author” Burroughs, even as it distributes the
Burroughs effects across texts, films, bodies, and music. The Burroughs effects thrive
precisely to the extent that they harbor a capacity for difference—the ability to en-
counter the difference of other contexts, to be affected and transformed by them.
Paradoxically, then, Burroughs’s route to immortality is to become other, adrift.
Uploading, as a technology of the self that is also such a technol-
ogy of replication, operates through the transaction spaces made available by global
capital and its emerging writing practices. Deferred to the future, the practice of up-
loading nonetheless mobilizes its own shattering effects: dislocation through antici-
pation. In defense of the plausibility of uploading, a poster on CryoNet, a discussion
group devoted to cryonics and other immortality technologies, highlights the “virtual”
character of money and work in the present:
I’ve also never had a “real” job. Work consists of force times distance. I do
some work on a keyboard, but it’s a negligible amount. My employer could
save money by replacing me with a steam engine which would press all the
keys with greater force, through a greater distance, more often, thus doing
far more work than I ever did. Actually, this wouldn’t save them any money
at all, as they never pay me money. They only give me pieces of paper that
have pictures of dead presidents on them. Come to think of it, they don’t
even do that. They give me pieces of paper which tell me that numbers in a
bank computer somewhere have been incremented. Which is silly, because
numbers can’t be in a computer, as numbers are just an abstraction. Actually,
they merely change the state of magnetization of various very tiny areas on a
disk belonging to a bank. Why should I do real work for that?16
In the relentless calculations and anticipations of uploading that take place on Usenet
groups like sci.nanotech and sci.cryonics, the evaluation of the uploaded self emerges
out of an economy not of individual “money changers” who can determine the verac-
ity of the “money of thought” but through the new mobilities of global markets.
Both labor—the hilarious vision of machinic replacement, itself substituting for a
thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters—and value—the shifting and fleeting
movements of magnetic media—are figured as elements in an economy of transfor-
mation, a regime not of the real but of “change.” Indeed, in this milieu the “real” has
become kitsch, a ridiculous throwback as primitive and charming as a steam engine.

U p l o a d i n g A n t i c i p a t i o n , B e c o m i n g S i l i c o n
The practices of everyday life, and the technologies of self that emerge through
them, are thus composed not so much of evaluation and verification as of anticipa-
tion, the sometimes anxiously performative constitution of futures. This ecology of
self flows with the “change of state”—machines transform human labor, numbers
are incremented, disks become reorganized. More than a displacement of the real by
the virtual, this narrative highlights the matrix of constant transformation within
which the discourse on uploading is articulated.
Indeed, this association of the alleged abstraction of virtuality
with the continual variation of global capitalism reminds us that virtuality is anything
but unreal. Virtualities may lack reference, drifting without anchor in the actual, but
it is precisely in the contingent relation of virtuality to actuality—becoming—that
new capacities to be affected, futures, emerge. Virtualities are less the ethereal pre-
cursors to actuality than the positivity of transformation itself, diagrams of futurity.
To encounter the virtual is to enter into an itinerary, an intermezzo Deleuze charac-
terizes less as an intentional effort and more as a capacity to be affected, an active
drifting or surfing: “The basic thing is how to get taken up in the movement of a
big wave, a column of rising air, to ‘come between’ rather than to be the origin of an
effort.”17
The uploaded subject, as the technology of self that effects the
writing of subjectivity not to flesh but to silicon, thus marks a relation to market
practices based not in the present or the past but the future, the continually itinerant
specter of a “change in state.” No longer referenced by the transcendental guarantee
of gold, the “conscience” of global capital emerges not from authenticity or original-
ity, but through the flickering of money’s double: the future. As mathematician and
semiotician Brian Rotman has argued, the “scandal” of the post–Bretton Woods
dollar is that it is “backed” only by its ability to be traded on a secondary market in
the form of futures contracts. This “xenomoney” is
floating and incovertible to anything outside itself . . . Its “value” is the relation
between what it was worth, as an index number in relation to some fixed and
arbitrary past state taken as an origin, and what the market judges it will be
worth at different points in the future.18
Thus the value of money, rather than keyed to its authenticity or originality, is con-
stituted by the future. It is the anticipated value—“what the market judges it will be
worth”—that drives the operations of futures markets, Cassian’s “money changers”
of the present. Rotman emphasizes the “loss of anteriority” that inheres in such a

shift in the status of monetary signs, but, as with my discussions of cryonics, I seek
to map the ways in which such markets operate through the rhetorical production of
anticipation, an active drift of anticipation that orients uploading’s technology of self
toward the future, a future of itself.
To be sure, “uploading” exists as an anticipatory technology of
the self. Like Burroughs’s “Clonies,” the technologies of silicon brain or body repli-
cation rely on material practices of the future. Robot surgeons, nanotechnological
assemblers, and extraordinarily high-resolution electron microscopes are among the
gadgets that can be deployed only contingently, in a possible future. But technologies
of the self are not, of course, simply technical. As in confession, where the discourse
network of Christian subjectivity operated through the disciplinary matrix of the
“money changer,” uploading operates in the present through the rhetorical produc-
tion or “uploading” of anticipation, a summoning of technologies from the future
that would constitute a self available for replication and immortality. While some
forms of Christian subjectivity, according to Foucault, produced interiority through
the masterful exterior relay of the priest, uploading’s technology of self forms a dis-
course circuit with the future, the arrival of differences that can only be followed,
encountered as an itinerary rather than an iteration. Though the nanotechnology
that would enable the uploading of human identity resides in a possible future, the
subjectivity formation that would produce and inhabit such technologies sprouts in
the itinerant, anticipatory ecology of the present. Indeed, in some sense uploading
emerges as the fantasmatic extrusion of a twenty-four-hour global market, a market
that demands a subject whose very body is money.
On the Other Thumb . . .
In William Gibson’s Neuromancer—that apparent obligatory passage point for any
discussion of “cyberspace”—such an anticipatory immortal replicant is figured as
Dixie, the “flatline construct,” a computer replication that renders the skills and ef-
fects of a hacker long dead.19 While Case, the appropriately named container for
drugs and hacking desire, has his very body leveraged by corporate capital—he must
complete the job to avoid the dissemination of toxins throughout his body, toxins
that will forever render him unfit for the ecology of cyberspace—Dixie’s leverage is
otherwise. In exchange for networking with Case and the completion of the job,
Dixie demands the right to be erased: “This scam of yours, when it’s over, you erase
this goddamn thing.”20 Dixie, in the grammatical third person—“this goddamn
thing”—anticipates a future of absence. No life, fucker.

U p l o a d i n g A n t i c i p a t i o n , B e c o m i n g S i l i c o n
What’s crucial to note in Gibson’s figuration of an upload—a
figuration that helps render uploading thinkable within the community of Trans-
humanists, Extropians, and other aficionados of uploading—is the role that Dixie’s
“body” plays in the transactions of Neuromancer. In this economy, even uploads get
paid. In Dixie’s second death, the currency of the transaction is nothing other than
his phantom body—its absence is the price that Case and Dixie’s employers pay for
work completed. Thus for Dixie it is possible not only to examine himself as if he
were currency; he is currency, the currency of a transaction that would allow his exit
from the money economy, i.e., out of any economy whatsoever, this “scam.”
Dixie’s currency, though, suffers the uncanny fate of the simu-
lacrum. Like Cassian’s technologist of self, that money changer called “conscience,”
Dixie ceaselessly evaluates the authenticity or “reality” of his own thought:
“How you doing, Dixie?”
“I’m dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that
one.”
“How’s it feel?”
“It doesn’t.”
“Bother you?”
“What bothers me is, nothin’ does.”21
But rather than merely experiencing this “nothin’” as a lack, Dixie notes the uncanny,
itchy presence of the simulacrum, comparing his fate to a phantom limb:
“Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was frostbit.
Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later, he’s tossin’ all night. Elroy,
I said, what’s eatin’ you? Goddamn thumb’s itchin’, he says. So I told him,
scratch it. McCoy, he says, its the other goddamn thumb.”22
An itch that can’t be scratched, the uploaded subject can only an-
ticipate. Rather than an incessant “verbalization of thought,” though, Dixie’s technol-
ogy of self operates through the anticipation of something other than the simulacrum,
the positive production of erasure, a fracture in the endless iterations of selfhood. In
his desire to erase his presence, Dixie seeks to comport a subject in the future that
would escape the nonstop operations of a market, an economy in which even one’s
own death must be purchased. In the present, Dixie regards his own “body” as an
abjected double—“this goddamn thing”—a regard that, in its very articulation, ren-
ders Dixie as a multiplicity, a being that is more than one.

This literary rendition of anticipation may seem to merely “rep-
resent” the desires of the computer-loving subjects of Silicon Valley for a tape
backup of identity, much as SimLife author Ken Karakotslos describes his “hope” in
the comic “About the Author” notes that come bundled with each game:
Ken Karakotsios lives in Northern California with his wife Lucia and their
three computers. He designed software in a previous life and hopes to some-
day return to hardware, as a program.23
But such a reading of Karakotsios’s “hope”—a symptom, no doubt, of the much dis-
cussed loathing of cyberpunks for “the body”—overlooks the productive work of
such anticipation in the constitution of the subjects bundled with contemporary
technoscience. “Uploading,” the desire to be wetware, makes possible a new technol-
ogy of the self, one fractured by the exteriority of the future. For Dixie, of course,
this exteriority is figured as erasure, but what seems crucial to uploaded subjectivity
is anticipation—a frenzied purgatory between the present and the future—rather
than any specific destination. And while “anticipation” is, of course, an affect that
has been available to hominids for some time, uploading seems to install discursive,
material, and social mechanism for the anticipation of an externalized self, a techno-
social mutation that is perhaps best characterized as a new capacity to be affected by,
addicted to, the future.
In Origins of the Modern Mind, cognitive scientist Merlin Donald
traces the relation between “external symbolic storage” and the cognitive evolution
of humans. With the emergence of writing, Donald argues, human cognition became
“permanently wedded” to external sources of memory in a “cognitive symbiosis
unique in nature.”24 Donald argues persuasively that the evolutionary emergence of
capacities for prediction and explanation—what he too simply characterizes as “theo-
retic thought”—were bundled with a dislocation of human memory. No longer lo-
calized “in” the human brain or body, memory becomes, with the emergence of
writing, an external symbolic affair.
Without granting some of Donald’s premises—the opposition
between oral and written culture, the precedence of theoretical thought, the binary
of a brain that resides “in here” versus a memory that resides “out there”—I would
nonetheless suggest that his arguments concerning the complex ecology of tech-
nologies of inscription and human cognition are highly suggestive for uploading.
For if external symbolic storage and theoretic culture rendered a subject with the ca-
pacities to be affected by the past—a complex of memory—then uploading tech-
nologies render a “subject” capable of being similarly affected by the future—a

U p l o a d i n g A n t i c i p a t i o n , B e c o m i n g S i l i c o n
complex of anticipation. As a rhetorical practice and a technology of the self, up-
loading composes what Deleuze and Guattari have characterized as a “collective
enunciation,” a set of speech acts whose articulation only emerges out of a multiplic-
ity—in this case the future(s). In contrast to the futural constitution of a Christian
subjectivity, in which confession and other disciplines suture the interiority of a sub-
ject that encounters the contingent future—“Will I go to Heaven?”—uploading
renders a subject entirely complicit with a contingency that is yet to come. As a kind
of externalized brain or “exobrain,” the uploaded subject launches synapses that re-
main fissured in the present and, perhaps, emerge as a thought of the future. The
selves that emerge out of such a set of practices are defined by a relation not to a
priest, nation, class, gender, race, or ethnicity, but to an enormous set of contingencies
that can only be encountered rather than predicted.25 Unlike the discourse circuit
described by Foucault, such a technology of self is constitutively itinerant; it is pre-
cisely the singularity of futures that is being cultivated or encountered. “Terrifying
to whom?”
While this may seem to be a literary affect provoked by an over-
dose on science fiction, new markets and forms of finance capital suggest that the
frenzied encounter with a contingent future is constitutive of more than Gibson’s
characters or of Usenet discourse. For if the literary technology of the uploaded self
still relies on a self as a “money changer” that examines itself through the lens of an
economic transaction, the market that would render any such transaction intelligible
has itself, sometimes, been uploaded into the computer softwares and financial instru-
ments I discussed earlier: exotic derivatives.
As you may recall, exotic derivatives are extraordinarily complex
financial instruments whose value can only be evaluated by computer softwares. A
contract with the future, the exotic differs from the usual run of futures contracts in
that it cannot be resold on a secondary market. Unlike, say, a contract on orange
juice futures for 2002, an exotic derivative cannot be sold to another investor over
the course of the contract. Instead, an exotic derivative is an algorithm whose execution
is deferred into the future.
Many exotics are deployed as hedges, as instruments that smooth
out the difference between the present and the future. So, for example, if AT&T is
planning to expand into the Chinese market in 2006, it might purchase a contract
that will lock in the cost of borrowing money at that time, freeze the price of fiber-
optic cable and hedge the cost of computer chips. As such, the exotic forestalls the
difference of the future—it is insurance against the contingency of markets yet to
come.

But the value of such a contract cannot, by definition, be deter-
mined until the contract is executed. In terms of the value of such a financial instru-
ment, then, one can only anticipate, based on the evaluation of the present or the
simulation practices of a computer. Unlike a conventional futures contract, whose
value can be determined by being sold, the value of a derivative resides in a strange
intermezzo space of anticipation, a virtual haunting by the future.
Engines of Anticipation
This rhetorical production of anticipation—the smearing of the future into the very
operations of the present—percolates through the quasi-popular, quasi-scientific
discourses that uploading draws on and lives in. Indeed, in If Uploads Come First, an
essay by researcher Robin Hanson whose title telegraphs the anticipated jouissance of
uploaded replication, the anticipation of uploading is itself networked with the market:
What does this all mean for you now? If you expect that you or people you
care about might live to see an upload transition, you might want to start to
teach yourself and your children some new habits. Learn to diversify your
assets, so they are less at risk from a large drop in wages; invest in mutual
funds, real estate, etc., and consider ways in which you might sell fractions of
your future wages for other forms of wealth. If you can’t so diversify, consider
saving more.26
So too does the appropriately named Foresight Institute—one of the foremost re-
sources for uploading discourse, founded by nanotechnological personality K. Eric
Drexler—operate in such an anticipatory economy. Not merely a site for research
into nanotechnology and uploading, Foresight’s policy is “to prepare for nanotech-
nology” by
• promoting understanding of nanotechnology and its effects;
• informing the public and decision makers;
• developing an organizational base for addressing nano-
technology-related issues and communicating openly about
them; and,
• actively pursuing beneficial outcomes of nanotechnology,
including improved economic, social, and environmental
conditions.

U p l o a d i n g A n t i c i p a t i o n , B e c o m i n g S i l i c o n
That is, the Foresight Institute is an institute of anticipation, a site of research into
the effects of a technology that will, perhaps, emerge in the future. This program of
anticipation emerges out of the writings of founder K. Eric Drexler. In his Engines of
Creation, Drexler described the powerful effects wrought by a shift in anticipation or
expectation:
Expectations always shape actions. Our institutions and personal plans both
reflect our expectation that all adults now living will die in mere decades.
Consider how this belief inflames the urge to acquire, to ignore the future in
pursuit of a fleeting pleasure. Consider how it blinds us to the future, and
obscures the long-term benefits of cooperation. Erich Fromm writes: “If the
individual lived five hundred or one thousand years, this clash (between his
interests and those of society) might not exist or at least might be consider-
ably reduced. He then might live and harvest with joy what he sowed in sor-
row; the suffering of one historical period which will bear fruit in the next
one could bear fruit for him too.”27
Thus research into nanotechnology—and by extension, uploading—becomes a rem-
edy for a blindness. This remedy opens a gaze to the future, a future whose technol-
ogy of self will not “ignore” but will be constituted by events to come. Indeed, it is
almost as if the first technology of nanotechnology is anticipation itself, a technology
mobilized by Foresight. So too are the effects of nanotechnology cast as anticipation—
the expectation of human subjects for extraordinarily long lives.28
An emphasis on the (often invisible) material economy of this
anticipatory progam—rather than a meatless, transcendental realm where the body
is “only” a rhetorical figure—highlights the contingency at play in the symbiotic en-
counter with silicon. Susan Oyama, writing of the metaphor of “program” within
developmental biology, notes that while a program may be quite predictable (and
hence not contingent) epistemologically, such algorithms retain an ontological con-
tingency insofar as they are dependent on a Rube Goldberg economy of temporal
and material factors for their instantiation:
reliably repeated assemblies can be noncontingent in the sense of being highly
predictable, while being thoroughly contingent in their dependence on com-
plex, highly extended systems of interacting factors whose dynamic organiza-
tion cannot be explained in terms of a single component or central agency.29
While Oyama writes of the operation of such contingency within biological systems,
her principle applies equally to other instantiations of the program metaphor. A
poster on sci.cryonics, in a discussion of uploading, put it this way:

If we knew what the result of a computer program would be, there would be
little point in writing or running it. In fact, it’s a fundamental theorem of
computer theory that in the general case, there’s no way to tell what a program
will do, other than to run it and see what happens.30
Crucial to this formulation is the constitutive role that contingency plays in “repeated
assembly” of computer programs. The very “point” or purpose of the program in-
volves, paradoxically enough, contingency. Becoming-silicon, uploaders are precisely
such programs. Tied not to any single central agency (such as an autonomous self),
programs find themselves contingent on the exterior assemblages with which they
are implicated. Thus as a technology of self, uploading must be seen not simply as
the erasure of contingency and the inscription of repetition. Instead, the dice throw
of uploading highlights the necessity of contingency, an ontological and epistemo-
logical contingency called “the future” that emerges out of the rhetorical and mate-
rial assemblage of uploading.
Within uploading discourse this anticipation of the materiality
of simulation—not what software is, but what it is contingently capable of becom-
ing—shatters the present, and disorients identity. In If Uploads Come First, the author
notes that different moments of replication would yield different versions of identity
in any given “present”:
Uploads who copy themselves at many different times would produce a zoo
of identities of varying degrees of similarity to each other. Richer concepts
of identity would be needed to deal with this zoo, and social custom and law
would face many new questions, ranging from “Which copies do I send
Christmas cards to?” to “Which copies should be punished for the crimes of
any one of them?”31
Indeed, these “richer” concepts of identity provoked by the discourse on uploading
include encounters with the effects that different material instantiations would have
on each upload. Hans Moravec, one of the canonical authors of uploading discourse,
notes the various dislocations of “identity” and “body” that would be fostered by dif-
ferent uploading platforms:
If you found life on a neutron star and wished to make a field trip, you might
devise a way to build a robot there of neutron stuff, then transmit your mind
to it. Since nuclear reactions are about a million times quicker than chemical
ones, the neutron-you might be able to think a million times faster.32

U p l o a d i n g A n t i c i p a t i o n , B e c o m i n g S i l i c o n
Of course, such a formulation preserves the category of a “you,” an identity that is
fundamentally the same, only faster, but the mobility anticipated by this argument is
not simply a mobility away from “the” body; it characterizes a space where bodies
are nodes in new becomings proper to humans:
Fast uploads who want physical bodies that can keep up with their faster
brains might use proportionally smaller bodies. . . . [A]n approx. 7 mm. tall
human-shaped body could have a brain that fits in its brain cavity, keeps up
with its approx. 260 times faster body motions, and consumes approx. 16 W
of power. Such uploads would glow like Tinkerbell in air, or might live un-
derwater to keep cool. Bigger slower bodies could run much cooler by using
reversible computers . . . Other uploads may reject the familiar and aggres-
sively explore the new possibilities. For such tiny uploads, gravity would seem
much weaker, higher sound pitches would be needed, and visual resolution
of ordinary light might decline (in both angular and intensity terms).33
Thus the anticipated body of the upload is not simply an occlu-
sion or amputation of the body and its contingencies; it is a promised body, one
summoned but not completed by the simulacrum. One poster to CryoNet, an enthu-
siast of both uploading and cryonics, outlines the debt that both such technologies
of the self have to the contingency of the future:
For me, the only thing I need to know is that there’s a chance, there’s hope
that they might revive me—that’s enough. As to whether I revive uploaded
or meat, or even in Tipler’s omega point, I don’t care. My reason for consid-
ering cryonics is not to establish some kind of continuity of identity with the
future; in fact I don’t think that identity means anything useful. I think we’re
waves on the ocean. I think that “I” and “you” are just roles, like “left” and
“right,” and I don’t invest those roles with any metaphysics beyond those of
the context of consideration. Is “I yesterday” the same as “I tomorrow”? To
me that’s just tommyrot.34
While this may seem to be a late-twentieth-century retooling of Pascal’s wager—
what have we got to lose?—I would argue that a more profound affirmation of risk
is at play here. Less enthralled to the immortality of the self than to the future itself,
uploading becomes a technology of self that renders the univocal self “tommyrot.”
Indeed, for this poster, the desire to be uploaded resides not so much in the self as in
the other of the future:

No, my reason for wanting to be suspended, or indeed for wanting to wake
up tomorrow, is purely irrational. It’s a creative urge. I like to build things,
to write things, to nurture things and impart things to others. I don’t care so
much who receives those things, so long as they find them useful. . . . If my
recipients are alive now, or if they’re in the crew of misfits and lollygaggers
that thaw me out in a few decades, or in a few thousand years, or at the end
of the universe, I don’t care—I find it equally satisfying to hope that one of
these ways I might create more things.35
Less an ontology of loss than of anticipation, uploading sloughs
off the body of the present and puts on the future, a future composed of contingency
rather than eternity. In some sense, then, uploaders are dependent on, even addicted
to, contingency. The possibilities of uploading are, through a feedback loop that re-
mains to be mapped, entangled with the networks of technoscience and desire that
would actualize its concepts. In addition, the futural practice of uploading is thor-
oughly networked with other uploads, even if those other uploads are replicants of
oneself. That is, replication entails an iterability that would make the claim for the
authenticity of any upload meaningless. For to be replicable, i.e., uploaded, is precisely
to be iterable, and when it comes to iteration (as with some salty snacks), you can’t
have just one. As Deleuze and Guattari articulated it in A Thousand Plateaus, it is
precisely this ability to be copied that is bundled with deterritorialization—“only
something deterritorialized is capable of reproducing itself.”36
Thus the unlimited character of the upload—its immortality
dose—depends not upon its ability to render the “original,” but upon connectivity,
the capacity to be networked and even sampled by other uploads, a capacity available
only in the future. Anticipation persists even through the actualization of the upload,
as the structural possibility of an upload becomes the capacity for futures, a future
not of persistence but of sampling, to become articulable in another moment or con-
text, the context of silicon. As in Burroughs’s method of the cut up, to become im-
mortal is to continually become other, a continual variation. Adrift . . .
This becoming-sampled marks a new ecology of subjectivity, one
in which the sheer exteriority and risk of the future—rather than the certainty of
death—sculpts the subject of the present. The diagram of human cognition drawn
by Donald and executed by multiple disciplines—an interiority constituted through
an external matrix of memory, folded into a pocket of regret, death, and secrecy—it-
self becomes folded, twisted into a Möbius body that is neither past nor future, but a
wetware intermezzo of anticipation.37
It will be objected that this new topology of subjectivity is not

U p l o a d i n g A n t i c i p a t i o n , B e c o m i n g S i l i c o n
real, that in its dependence upon technologies that are yet to come, it is at best a
messianic ethos. This is correct, if one persists in understanding uploading as an en-
tirely technical project whose success can be determined in terms of actual uploads.
But as a virtual entity—a concept—uploading is hardly immaterial, as it attracts re-
sources—for research on nanotechnology, for example—and constitutes subjects in
the present. Indeed, fusion with the computer could be seen to be the contemporary
vanishing point of the human, an optical orientation that, like other vanishing
points, organizes human life even though it is thoroughly fictive. I will close with an
account not of a vanishing point, whose optics seem to have vanished, but with a re-
gard for an encounter with the fracture, a fissure of consciousness that perhaps best
maps becoming-silicon.
The Outcome; or, What You’ve Been Waiting For
Jean Baudrillard ends his now canonical text Simulations with a remarkable example
of life in the field of simulacra, an example that perhaps encapsulates the all-too-
speedy-and-greedy nature of Baudrillard’s formulation of simulacra as the “desert of
the real.” Speaking of the conflation of the real and its models, a moment in which
the real becomes nothing other than the ability to be reproduced, Baudrillard meditates
on a moment when
each is already technically in possession of the instantaneous reproduction of
his own life, where the pilots of Tupolev that crashed at Bourget could see
themselves die on their own camera.38
Whereas Baudrillard, in a kind of instant metaphysics, a metaphysics of the instant,
collapses the execution of a death with its simulation, this very example articulates
the way in which uploads enthrall through anticipation. The witnessing of one’s
own death, as a virtual event, can only be rhetorically and not corporeally rendered.
Rather than enforcing Baudrillard’s declaration that the real has disappeared in favor
of the implosions of the hyperreal, the gaze of the pilot allegorizes the futural charac-
ter of uploads: such replicants enthrall with the impossible, next image, a becoming-
visible, an agonizingly gorgeous unfolding.
Gilles Deleuze, in his two-volume work on cinema, offers a com-
pelling diagram of such an image. As I discussed in the case of the dog, Lazarus,
Deleuze argues that while the classical cinematic image operated through the visual-
ization of movement, the mutant sign of the postwar cinema is the time-image.
Whereas the movement-image, Deleuze claims, animates movement through an
absence—a hole or gap between cinematic frames “where” movement occurs—and

focuses on the apparently self-moving entities within frames, the time-image renders
the gap or cut itself, the “intermezzo” or the “interstice.” If the classical cinematic
image operates with a movement “buried” in the interior of the cinematic assemblage,
a visible invisibility of the present, then simulation, particularly uploading, seems to
work through a becoming-visible of the future, a becoming whose rhetorical effect is
“anticipation” and whose “ontology” is algorithmic and complex. Rather than com-
posing its image through gaps in the present, the simulation is constituted out of
a fracture or a fractal, the unlimited finitude of the future, virtuality crashing into
actualization.
What You Were Waiting For, Part Two: Long Live the New Flesh
David Cronenberg, in Videodrome, meditates on a kind of “uploading” onto video.39
At the end of the film, when the main character, played by James Woods, raises a
newly grafted and thoroughly oozing gun to his head as a sacrifice of his old body in
favor of the “new flesh” of video, we are again, like the pilots at Orly, anticipating
the virtual witnessing of one’s own death—Woods is, of course, on video as he makes
the transition to the new flesh of video. But the anticipatory gaze leads to a blank
screen, an interstice that paradoxically comes at the end.
Rather than a simple refusal to display the “world” of the new
flesh, Cronenberg’s production of a blank yields the mechanism of the “new flesh,”
an invisible mechanism whose visibility is continually anticipated but which is im-
aged only through a fracture or a break. Robin Hanson’s If Uploads Come First simi-
larly figures this image of the future in his subtitle: “The Crack of a Future Dawn.”
Uploading is thus an anticipation of precisely “more life,” life not free of the body
but distributed into spaces not yet visible, our best name left for the remains of life
in the age of the simulacrum, the algorithmically complex whose only ontology re-
sides in its instantiation, an instantiation incessantly at play in the future.
Uploading, it is clear, is a technology of self that as yet replicates
little. It intrigues not so much because this technology of self is common or even
likely to be so. Rather, uploading discourse offers a map of contemporary technologies
of self, technologies that are contingently sculpted. Addicted to contingency, or
prowling for mastery, uploaded subjects mark out the materiality and possibility of
the new flesh, anticipated flesh that is something other than either transcendental or
meatless. As for my own anticipations, I’ll adopt an affect not of anxious waiting but
of cheerful and prankish hailings of the future. “More contingency, fucker,” or to
sample Alluquere Roseanne Stone in a rather anticipatory mood, “I hope to observe
the outcome.”40

S E V E N

They’ll get a fuckin shock, when they see this near-corpse, this package of wasting flesh
and bone just rise and say. . .
Irvine Welsh, Marabou Stork Nightmares
I have argued incessantly throughout this growth that the massive changes wrought
by the narratives and practices of molecular biology have shifted the very concept of
life at play in contemporary culture as distinctions between living systems and ma-
chines have begun to blur and morph.1 No longer attached to organisms, life becomes
an emergent attribute of information systems, networks without any obvious center.
In the example of artificial life, contemporary culture is beginning to be populated
with entities whose “life” is both uncertain and difficult to locate. Uploaders form a
futures market for a subjectivity franchise on the Internet domain, an ex-corporation
whose installation shatters the autonomous individual into a sample of continual
variation. More than a repetitious immortality, uploaders provoke a new relation to
the future: being-sampled. The very transformations that would make possible the
copying of human subjectivity onto silicon also enable new forms of deterritorializa-
tion, the promiscuous splicing of subject effects not unlike those acts of bacterial
conjugation, transduction, and transformation detailed by biologist Lynn Margulis.2
Dot Coma:
The Dead Zone of Media and
the Replication of Family Values

These new distributions of vitality—both fantastic and scien-
tific—are not confined to that usual ecology of virtuality, silicon. Comatose bodies
cultivate yet another, singular execution of an informatic body. Accompanied by more
than the visualization of an EEG and the machinic yoga of life support—Breathe in!
Breathe out!—coma patients are connected to multiple rhetorical machines that
would govern this strange flesh and enable its narration. In what follows I map out
some of the capacities and threats posed by those bodies whose vitality is articulated
as a signal, “wetwares” through which contemporary informatics are instantiated.3
Out of the Barrel of a Gun
Gary Dockery of the Chattanooga Police Department was shot in the head in Sep-
tember of 1988. He subsequently went into a comatose state, and was silent for seven
years. In February of 1996, Dockery developed pneumonia, and his condition wors-
ened as his lungs filled with fluid. “His family was given the choice of risky surgery
or letting the disease take his life.” Such a decision, of course, proved difficult: How
to manage the enormous contingencies associated with such a calculation? On the
one hand, the family had good reason to wonder if the pneumonia was not a blessing,
an end to the lengthy suffering he had endured. At the same time, the very indeter-
minacy of Dockery’s state argued for further aid; some argued that he had suffered
enough, others thought that no help should be spared.
Only the agon and difference of argument could broker such a
decision; a true differend, the Dockery’s decision could not be made through recourse
to any maxim or law, even as it was the law itself that distributed the decision to the
family. Family members argued the situation in Dockery’s room as Dockery grappled
with pneumonia in silence.
Four hours later, Dockery spoke. For eighteen straight hours,
Dockery spoke of the time, read thermometers both digital and analog, and said that
he “did not want to go back to the village,” a nursing home facility where he had
been “living.” The sheer excess of the discourse, as well as its novelty, provoked media
interest, and within hours the story was reported in print, television, radio, and web
sources. The volume of talk about Gary Dockery’s coma, both by Dockery and the
media, would be difficult to quantify, but it unerringly focused on the odd rhetorical
situation the Dockerys found themselves in. Of what caused Gary’s return,
Dr. Folkening said Gary Dockery’s illness, the change of environment, an
onslaught of visitors after years of sparse contact and hearing discussions of
his death may have contributed to his awakening.4

D o t C o m a
In light of Dockery’s discursive eruption, the family decided to go ahead with the
surgery.
But even as Dockery’s speeches would seem to eradicate the ambi-
guity of the coma—clearly he was alive, unambiguously responding to his name,
talking with his child on the telephone—a new and disturbing uncertainty emerged
out of Dockery’s clarification. If Dockery had made it clear to his family that he in-
deed wanted to live, his very persuasiveness threatened the fragile certainty that sur-
rounded comatose patients everywhere. If such agency persisted in the coma victim,
a patient for whom families must speak, it would render even more difficult and un-
certain the calculations that undergird life support. Even after his testimony, the
Dockerys were unsure of the decision to operate, as the surgery could once again
plunge Gary into silence even as he spoke for his life for eighteen hours. On the
Christian Broadcast Network, Gary’s mother spoke of their discord:
I had to wrestle with some of them. Some of them did want to give up. As a
matter of fact, last Sunday most all the family, his son and even some of my
children wanted to give up and just go ahead and let him go, and I refused
because God gave me a promise.5
But the ambiguity provoked by Gary Dockery’s blue streak was not confined to the
decision regarding his own surgery; it would haunt the deployment of decisions
made by families everywhere. These decisions were already troubled by the impossible
evaluation of the contingency or worth of the patient’s life; now the dangerous out-
break of comatose agency in Chattanooga undermined the worth of familial opinion
itself; Dockery’s voice would seem to have more weight than the legally legitimated
voice of the family, that voice through which the coma speaks. So too was the popular
image of medicine under attack:
The wonder of the Gary Dockery saga is why did he speak just as his family
was resigned to letting him die?
“We have no explanation at this time,” Dr. Kaplan says.6
The silence of the medical community only exacerbated the import of a prior
silence—that of comatose bodies:
I think the biggest interest this will spark is mutism after this sort of injury.
We assume mute means that not much is going on. The fact remains that
Gary Dockery was mute for seven and one half years and now is capable of
speech.7

The medical profession worked quickly to dispel any fears that the brain dead were
anything other than unambiguously dead. While early reports of the Dockery case
spoke of his emergence from a coma, not “the mummy walks” but the coma speaks,
physicians gradually pointed out a subtle distinction between two different types of
brain death—the persistent vegetative state (PVS) and whole brain death or brain-
stem death. On National Public Radio we learned that
Dr. John Caronna, a professor of clinical neurology, tells Noah that the story
of Gary Dockery’s waking up from a 7-year coma is not entirely accurate.
Medically, Dockery has maintained consciousness, but severe brain damage
from a gunshot wound limited his response to stimuli. Caronna says some-
thing energized him, increasing his ability to communicate. But it’s unclear
if he will continue to improve or not.8
This “grandfathering” of Dockery into a PVS rather than a whole brain or brainstem
death failed to eradicate the ambiguity that suffuses the coma patient. How could
there be more than one type of brain death? The proliferation of distinctions makes
possible finer grades of discipline on the comatose body—indeed, it makes the dif-
ference between being a “neomort,” available for organ donation, and being a coma-
tose subject, available, contingently, for the future—but it also undermines the uni-
vocality and persuasiveness of the declarations of death. No longer a binary “She’s
alive!” or “I’m sorry, we lost her,” the diagnosis of death now becomes a continuum,
with each distinction threatening to blur into the next, while the comatose body pre-
pares to be “energized.” The “something” that enabled a comatose body to speak in
this instance was, of course, a very specific species of speech act or virtual witnessing
that operates through the absence not of the other but of the self: “hearing discus-
sions of his death.”9
Of course, “comas” have always been speech acts. First articu-
lated as a medical definition by French physicians Mollaret and Goulon in 1959, the
coma depasse was redescribed by an ad hoc committee at Harvard University as “brain
death” in 1968.10 By 1981, the new taxonomical category of “brain death” became
part of UDDA, the Uniform Declaration of Death Act. The twenty-two-year period
that spans Mollaret and Goulon’s discussion of coma depasse, irreversible coma, and
the retooled “declaration” of death testifies not only to the distinctive shift that had
taken place in the constitution of legal death, from corporeal movement to televisual
signal. It also indexes the heterogeneity and contingency at play in the various criteria
deployed around these boundary criteria, a boundary that is seemingly self-evident
but remarkably murky: life/death.

D o t C o m a
This ambiguity is not, of course, confined to the present. Physi-
cian John Cheyne, in his classic 1812 text Cases of Apoplexy and Lethargy: With Observa-
tions upon the Comatose Diseases, finds paradoxically that apoplexy (the coma’s genealog-
ical precursor) strikes those who seemed least likely to be struck down by ill health.11
And Cheyne’s attempts to define “apoplexy” meet with only what he would charac-
terize as a “rhetorical” satisfaction.12
The continual ambiguity and contingency that haunt this “dec-
laration” of death is evinced in numerous accounts of medical practice. Bioethicist
Lance K. Stell writes of the effects of death’s apparent new multiplicity:
Despite the intent to underscore the neurological basis of traditional criteria
for death, the term “brain-death” has itself exacerbated confusion. To many
laypersons (and to some medical professionals too, unfortunately), “brain-
death” suggests that there is more than one kind of death (“brain-death” and
“cardio-respiratory death”), or that there is more than one way to be dead
(in a brain-sort-of-way and in a heart-sort-of-way), or that there are degrees
of being dead (“brain-dead” and “really dead” or “dead-dead”), or that one
might die more than once (first, when one’s brain dies and again later when
one’s heart stops).13
This continual multiplicity provokes the question that I ask as a rhetorician: How is
this ambiguity and contingency managed in the narratives and articulations of the
comatose body today, and what sorts of bodies and configurations of power do these
management tactics enable?
The outbreak of excitement and uncertainty at the site of Dock-
ery’s comatose body was managed, by the media, through relentless recourse to
Dockery’s family. The media, too, talked a blue streak, and the unnerving possibility
that it may have been the family’s discussion that provoked the outburst was continu-
ally alluded to even if it was rarely named. So too did media reports imply that
Dockery’s incommunicado was attributable to a lack of attention on the family’s
part. In the first year after the shooting, Dockery communicated with blinks, nods,
and grimaces, but “that stopped when visitors diminished after a few years.”14 At the
same time, the family itself became the vector of comatose reanimation, as it was the
very voices of the family that were presumed to have “energized” Dockery.15
Ungovernable even (or perhaps especially) by a medicine that
deploys finer and finer distinctions, the comatose body becomes the promise and bur-
den of families, an obligation toward the proper comportment of a body and its organs
toward a future riddled with contingency and subject to the continual articulations

of a spectacle. While Dockery’s mother “wrestled” with family members in the
incalculable arguments over his surgery and his future, she also had to wrestle with
the ongoing interest of the media. Indeed, according to the Web page devoted to
the Dockery family,
The Reunion Will Welcome Two Special Cousins
Two Special Cousins plan to attend the Association Reunion in Cherokee
Co., NC the second weekend of September,1996. They are:
Dennis Dockery of Chattanooga, TN, who is a brother of Gary Dockery.
Gary was the policeman who was shot in the head while on duty and had
been in a coma for seven years when he suddenly began to talk this past Feb-
ruary. This miracle story was widely reported by news media across America.
Dennis will bring us up-to-date on Gary’s condition, as well as how the family
has attempted to deal with the media blitz.16
My point here is not that families should not be the locus of power in the complex
economy of medicine and culture that surrounds the comatose patient. Rather, this
medical and media episode highlights the rather unstable character of the comatose
body, a body for whom no medical distinctions appear adequate and whose diagnosis
is rife with ambiguity. In this situation it is the “values” of the patient’s family that
are called on to legitimate the governance of the comatose subject, “values” that also
find little strength in distinctions. Rather than a sign of contemporary medicine’s
humanism, its tender yielding in the face of familial wishes, the recourse to the family
as a site from which to govern the comatose body underscores the familial disciplines
that form the unspoken ground of contemporary health, health that ultimately fails
or returns under the aegis of familial “care.” If health is life lived in the silence of the
organs, then the coma is a silent life sustained within the noise of familial discourse.
A Phone Is Ringing . . .
Hello?
A telephone was ringing, somewhere else. A voice interrupts the
ring, somewhere in the middle, between the iteration of one ring, followed by an-
other, and another.
The voice rings true. It is indeed who we think it is. A dead
mother, separated from her son by war, by the Nazis, those horrendous assemblages
of division and erasure, lives, and the formerly infinite distance of death is bridged by
an area code, an exchange, a four-digit number. We get death’s number—a simple

D o t C o m a
inquiry into “information” suffices—and in return we receive a word, indeed, an
“address.”
“Hello?”
This speech act—one that hums with an analysis provided by
Avital Ronell, on another line—comes as a surprise, like all interruptions.17 It is an
eruption of a question. Noisy, this unprecedented speech act sounds difference, the
difference of an altogether other future: a future of life is on the line.
But we have to hang up, because this is the movies, a cinematic
deployment of comas and their effects that, perhaps, doesn’t speak to us. Our film, in
hanging up, interrupts itself, images interruption. What had been promised here, in
David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, was the visual
rendering of a comatose body that would, somehow, tell us its future, a future that
does not, unlike the coma, bear the burdens of contingency.18 Cronenberg’s camera
images John Smith, a high school English teacher (Christopher Walken) smitten with
the writing of horror—“Tomorrow, we’ll discuss the legend of Sleepy Hollow. I
think you’ll like it. It’s about a school teacher who gets chased by a headless demon”—
as a coma victim who experiences a kind of second sight upon his awakening from a
five-year coma, a period of no time at all for Smith (or the viewer) but which spells
five years in cinema time, thirty-five years to a TV dog. This second sight is less a
mastery of the exercise of prophecy than an overtaking, a wave of the future that im-
pacts Smith with all the terror of a force from the outside—the exteriority of thought,
the “outside” of the body, the materiality of time.
Overtaken by an image of the future, Smith acts to intervene in
the image, to act in it and on it. Hacking the future, Smith attracts familial connec-
tions—they are the point of articulation for this second sight. The coma victim’s
psychic powers are invested at nodes in the familial network. “Your daughter,” he
screams to a nurse, “is screaming.” “Your mother,” Smith tells his astonished doctor,
“she’s still alive.” Family, in this rendition, becomes the obligatory passage point for
any encounter with the future whatsoever. Family, and its repetition of the tired old
laws of lack, remains the hang-up that will not be interrupted.
The potency of the family—its unique character as a site that can
channel, in effect, the future—is not materially limited to Johnny the coma victim’s
strange powers. It also emerges as a second-order effect, a virtual ricochet of an ac-
tual vision. Johnny’s deployment of his second sight under the media glare of tele-
vision cameras provokes a stroke in his mother as she views the screen. The knowledge
of a familial secret—“You want to know why your sister killed herself?” Johnny says
to an overly inquisitive member of the media—operates on maternal flesh through

the virtual relay of the screen, at a distance. Nuclear holocaust—one version of the
future rendered in Smith’s second sight—is avoided when a populist, neofascist polit-
ical figure takes refuge from an assassin by hoisting the body of an infant to ward off
bullets, bullets fired by Smith in his coma-augmented second sight. The flesh of
heterosexual reproduction literally armors the present and forestalls the future, in all
of its terrible difference.
Perhaps this investment of the power of the coma in the familial
network is incidental to its representation in Cronenberg’s vision. But bundled with
contemporary renderings of the comatose body as they appear in diverse American
media outlets and international ecologies of literature, it would appear otherwise.19
Instead, comatose bodies and subjects are incessantly articulated through familial
dramas, family “units” that are invested with new powers even as capital disperses,
distributes, and networks the nation-state. Ungovernable by states—who can only
excel in the melancholy of waiting—it is only through the family that a coma patient
“speaks.”20
Waiting, of course, is a practice of the interval, a space between
actions. The example with which we were interrupted—the dead zone—nicely con-
tains the various ambiguities of this space “between” life and death by eliding them.
Smith awakens, scarless, and sees his healed body as a miraculous sign—all smashed
up but “no bandages.” Similarly, the trauma that the comatose state poses for narra-
tive—What will happen next?—is rendered invisible, passed over in the traversal of
one scene by another. And yet the radical ambiguity of the comatose state—Is he
alive? Is he dead? How should we comport ourselves toward him?—produces other
effects, the dissolution of the opposition between past and future. As the mystery of
the coma is figured here precisely through its elision of time—“You gotta under-
stand,” Johnny explains to his former fiancée, “For me it is like we just spoke yester-
day”—it is through his uncanny existence outside of time—the dead zone—that the
coma continues to do its work in the narrative.
But even as such an image arrests the ambiguity of the comatose
body—a body that, in its return, can see outside of time, obliterating contingency—
the alterity that seems to inhere in comatose bodies returns. The very source of
Smith’s second sight becomes undecidable, as soon as the stupor of the cinematic ex-
perience is shrugged off. The paranoid viewer recalls that our schoolteacher had ef-
fectively prophesied his own coma with his assignment—“The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow.” The possibility that the prophecies deployed by Smith are of a literary
and not a comatose origin haunts even this fantastic management of the thoroughly

D o t C o m a
ambiguous coma, a state of corporeality that smears our definitions of life and death.
Under this reading—an experience of the film that one cannot choose but whose effects
are irreversible—the comatose interval becomes less a cause than a trigger, a catalyst
for the second sight whose roots are, very possibly, literary.21
As viewers of such a film, we are then placed in a remarkable
quandary, even a hollow. Certainly, one could merely shrug off “Sleepy Hollow” as a
cheap foreshadowing, a minor detail that retroactively produces a sense of “aha.”
But such an experience—the momentary, jouissance-laden gasp of recognition—is it-
self isomorphic to the profound interruption figured by the coma. That is, such an
“aha” itself functions as what writer Catherine Clément has characterized as a “syn-
cope,” a kind of micro-awakening that proceeds from a micro-coma, a forgetting
provoked by the viewing of a film, the reading of a text.22
Thus even the degradation of the ridiculously literal B-movie
foreshadowing fostered by “Sleepy Hollow” serves only to provoke yet another ques-
tion: Where have I been? While the viewer is hardly in the situation of corporeal injury
referenced by Christopher Walken’s character—all smashed up—she nevertheless
enjoys an isomorphic dislocation. Some small element of the past returns, and is rec-
ognized as a prophecy of the future, a telltale sign not heeded until it is literally too
late—the present. Such a dislocation puns on Johnny’s affliction—it is the second
“cite,” the iteration of a text or an image through which one encounters one’s place
“between” two cites, a hiatus or a breath through which the “aha” emerges.
Cronenberg’s and King’s rewriting and repetition of the Sleepy
Hollow tale—itself a tale of the terrible effects of the literary—provokes the limbo
of the coma in the viewers of The Dead Zone even as it ensures that the comatose
body will only speak through the family. The rhetorical algorithm of The Dead Zone
operates through an acceleration of the very logic that makes film possible. The in-
terruption—that moment between Smith’s entry into a coma and his emergence—
injects Smith with precisely the ingredient needed to “see” the future—interruption
itself. Not simply a lack or down time, Smith’s hiatus becomes a “sleepy hollow,” a
space between life and death, one frame and the next, an interstice that enables the
invisibility par excellence—time—to be imaged, transformed into a “zone.”23
But what is imaged in The Dead Zone is not so much the future
“itself” as the character of futures, events whose arrivals are syncopated in a rhythm
of continual interruption. Interruption—that communication breakdown—is here
figured as what the future does. Smith does not know the future—he doesn’t even
know, in the present, what the status of his encounter with the future is. Instead, like

the syncope that destroys his mother’s body, the future interrupts Smith, and he, un-
like our first caller, cannot hang up.
Such a logic of interruption—to encounter the future, let it break
you up, put you into a coma, kill you—cannot, like our reading, be chosen. Such a
procedure is articulated in Deleuze and Guattari as the “connect-I-cut,” recipes for
becoming that depend on a healthy dose of forgetting and breakdown.24 As with exotic
derivatives—those morphologies of capital whose encounter with the future depends
crucially on an interval of nonknowledge, a dead zone of value—the comatose body
is constituted by its noisy, inarticulable silence: what will happen?25 In this register,
The Dead Zone maps the governance of the comatose body by making it speak, and in
so doing outlines contemporary modes of subjection—literally, the emergence of
comatose individuals as they are networked with the family. The family ventrilo-
quizes the subject as a crucial aspect of its own propagation, a distribution that is not
simply of a biological order.
Comatose bodies challenge the referential capacities of discourse.
As in the fetus, they provoke a referential panic, a pro-lifer- ation of attempts to render
a sturdy border between life and its others.26 Sheer growth without consciousness, a
becoming-plant, comatose bodies are uncanny for their doubling of life. One sees
the signs of life, one is even drawn to speak. “Don’t leave me Johnny. We’re gonna
get married.” Yet in the end, one just doesn’t know the nature of one’s audience—
where does the machine end, flesh begin?
But comas threaten more than the boundary between life and
death or flesh and machines; they disturb reproduction itself, or at least the family’s
monopoly on the propagation of human life through heterosexual reproduction.
After awakening from his accident—a close encounter with a milk truck, the beginning
of a machinic nursing that allows him to wait for the future—Johnny is visited by his
parents. “You’ve been lost for five years, and now reborn unto me,” his mother de-
clares. With her biblical citing, Vera recaptures the strange eruption of life out of
the machinic environment of the coma into the logic of reproduction—“reborn
unto me”—and reattaches the generation of vitality to a mother. “Lost,” without
reference to the family, Johnny’s miraculous rebirth from the machinic labor or
“trance” of the coma is the second cite or site of birth. In naming it as a birth,
Johnny’s mother both marks the threat to heterosexual reproduction posed by his
revival and manages it through recourse to the maternal body.
For if life can emerge out of multiple connections to machines,
the role of heterosexuality in the propagation of a human future becomes visibly and

D o t C o m a
disturbingly questioned. In place of the alliance of ovum, sperm, and futurity, Johnny’s
birth marks the new capacities of machines. And unlike the offspring of reproduction,
on whom the mark or “navel” of originality persists, the progeny of a machinic
economy of replication foster an erasure of reference, a doubling that is at the core
of the notion of immortality associated with cloning and uploading, a repetition
that sutures the very interval foregrounded in The Dead Zone. In place of the astonish-
ing arrival of novelty associated with birth, such replicas offer the “already seen” or
second sight of déjà vu: “There I am again.”
Indeed, Johnny’s “accident” all too predictably occurs precisely
through an interruption of heterosexual reproduction. Instead of spending the night
coupling with his fiancée, Smith ventures out to drive on roads slick with rain, promis-
ing to marry Sarah and noting that “Some things are worth waiting for.” In the acci-
dent—itself caused by a trucker’s sleepy, nodding hiatus—much blood, and much
more milk, is spilled.
During the five-year wait—what in banking terms we might call
the “float” of Johnny’s promise to marry—Sarah, in the words of Johnny’s mother,
“cleaves now unto another man, a husband.” To “cleave,” of course, means both to
split and to attach, a connection that puns on cutting. In this instance, Sarah’s connec-
tion to the husband produces a child, a ten-month-old son she introduces to Johnny
with Freud’s famous epithet—“his majesty.” Sitting around the table with Johnny,
Sarah, and her son Denny, Johnny’s father remarks, “You know, it feels good to have
a family eating around the table again.”
This network of examples seem to connect family—whether in
its simulated form at the dinner table, the sovereign kingdom of the baby, or in the
actual flesh of Johnny’s mother—to any means of making the coma refer. In the dis-
course of his mother, Johnny’s emergence from the coma marks his hiatus as a long
labor, a labor that in the end is a rebirth unto the maternal body. In place of a lively
ecology of machines, Johnny is reborn unto a mother, ensuring at least a rhetorical
monopoly of the maternal on reproduction.
In the context of the simulated family gathered around the table,
the coma is occluded through recourse to the evidence of Denny, a child testifying
to the apparent fantasy of the past—“his majesty” the king whose word, or silence, is
law: the coma never happened, Johnny and Sarah’s coupling was never interrupted,
and the maternal body of Johnny’s mother has been exchanged for the reproductive
success of Sarah. Here the family form is established precisely to the extent that ma-
ternity and paternity—those signs of “family”—are iterable and thus detachable

from any particular context. In this milieu, the immortality of the family form itself—
its ability to replicate over time, ad infinitum—helps manage the strange contingency
and finitude of the coma.
To make sense both of the odd state of the coma and the miracle
of its closure, the eruption of life out of machines, families are mobilized. In the face
of what Félix Guattari has characterized as new “collective arrangements,” social
and technical groupings that would bestow and maintain the life of human beings,
narratives of the coma recuperate the monopoly of the family on life by making the
coma speak only on the register of the familial. Indeed, even in his flight from the
traces of family—he no longer can bear seeing his former fiancée—Johnny provides
us with his second cite from Sleepy Hollow: “As he was a bachelor, and in nobody’s
debt, nobody troubled their head about him anymore.” An alleged escape from the
familial matrix operates only through the double negations of family and capital—
bachelorhood and indebtedness. The “value” of the family, in this context, emerges
from an ability to evaluate the strange event called the coma.
In contrast to the comatose body, which miraculously emerges
from an environment of machines and care, his majesty heterosexual reproduction is
conceptualized—by a Christianity of the father, a psychoanalysis of the Law, and by
that state privilege dubbed the “tax write-off” in the contemporary United States—as
a Euclidean, triangular relation, Mommy/Daddy/Child. This clean logic—one which
continually reinscribes the “autonomy” of the fetus/child, the father, the mother, as
if all weren’t entangled with all—tames the obvious multiplicity of heterosexual re-
production into an order: heredity. Reproduction’s territory, its necessary habitat,
becomes narratable in terms of a name. As such, family operates as an algorithm, a
recipe for converting the syntactic distributions of alterity—the chance and “drift”
at play in evolutionary systems—into the semantic, narratable regimes of a people
that know who they are: “You are a Doyle!”
This command at the heart of the family is threatened by the
comatose body’s refusal to signify—“I can’t hear you!” as a drill sergeant might put
it. It is disturbed as well by the visible rhizome of connections that make the ongoing
life of a comatose body possible, a tangle of connections that renders laughable any
simple demarcation of the comatose “subject.”27 Mute, without response, comatose
bodies seem always about to speak. The strange confessionals that accompany the
rhythmic, machinic cadence of the coma are judgments that the coma is a becoming,
a trajectory and not a state. About to speak, about to die, the comatose body fosters
continual becomings-other.
The fact that something else, it seems, is always about to happen

D o t C o m a
to the comatose body foregrounds the incessant labor and discipline the familial
franchise demands, as this anticipatory state calls forth every interpretation of every
sign that can be mustered. This discipline—the means by which families might main-
tain their monopoly on reproduction, on human life itself—operates not only through
the deployment of flesh, but through the propagation and actualization of concepts.
In the case of comas, an uncanny entity I will call the “virtual maternal” forestalls
the possibility that something other than human, heterosexual reproduction is en-
tailed in the emergence of a coma survivor’s life.
And Mommy’s on the Phone . . . Or, “It’s a Coma!”
Feminist scholars have argued convincingly that the threats posed to the familial
monopoly by reproductive technologies have recoiled onto women’s bodies. The
rhetorical amputation of the fetus from maternal bodies bites into actual flesh as
women and uteruses have increasingly become incarcerated, surveyed, purchased,
and disciplined. But the new technologies of life maintenance also interpolate the
contemporary family, and this threat entails precisely the obliteration of the body
enacted in the discourse of fetal “rights.” In this case, however, the maternal body is
far from invisible—it becomes a privileged site for making the comatose body speak,
a body that the family recomposes out of its fetal obliteration. This composition oper-
ates not through the attachment of a fetal body to actual flesh—in The Dead Zone,
mothers are either killed, telephonically terminated, or shot—but through the rhetor-
ical production of maternal effects. Having liquidated the body and agency of mother-
hood in the contemporary United States, families recompose the maternal body, the
possibility of heterosexual reproduction, through virtual tactics. Forced to speak out
of her silent labor, the mother appears in The Dead Zone as a telephonic entity, one
who mothers without consciousness, a machine for reproduction.28
If a comatose body’s trajectory—its becoming—is rendered unto
narrative by the maternal body, this rendering is an uneasy, even labored, one. Ven-
triloquizing biblical prose, Johnny’s mother, Vera, attempts to connect his return to
the divine matrix of reproduction. But the very oddity of Vera’s speech—its character
as a cite, a machinic repetition from elsewhere—unhinges the connection: Neither
resurrection nor birth, Johnny’s return appears without causation, without origin, a
“miracle.” Nursed by networks of machines and care, the comatose body puts a new
spin on the reproductive concept of “expecting.”
For if Smith—or, as his “John Doe”-like name suggests, any coma
victim whatsoever—emerges into life out of a machinic environment, it is a life of the
future. Befallen by the future, the comatose body is a virtual body, one continually

anticipated but not yet actualized. One speaks to it and waits: “waiting patiently for
something to happen.”29 Literally unconscious, alive, comatose bodies become con-
scious subjects through the continually, hopefully expected interruption called the
future. Without recourse to consciousness—of a mother and her labor, of a fertility
clinic, of a surrogate—life emerges, veritably laboring with the future.
Valerie Hartouni articulates this odd capacity of the comatose
body to labor in her 1991 essay, “Containing Women: Reproductive Discourse in
the 1980s.” Hartouni focuses on the ability of the maternal body to disappear under
the increased visibility and agency of the fetus. But Hartouni’s analysis also enables
an understanding not of the disappearance of the maternal but of its deterritorial-
ization, its becoming-virtual. Hartouni describes the case of a newspaper headline:
“Brain-Dead Mother Has Her Baby.” In this instance of a comatose body that has
become downright swollen with agency—for clearly in this instance “having” is
most definitely a “doing”—Hartouni highlights the paradoxical annihilation of mater-
nal agency as the “mother” becomes less verb than noun. In the context of its cita-
tion into a headline, Hartouni notes that
motherhood is equated with pregnancy and thereby reduced to a physiological
function, a biologically rooted, passive—indeed in this case, literally mind-
less—state of being.30
Indeed, Hartouni argues that, as such nouns or states of being, pregnant women are
merely “mediums or physical vessels for new life, not active participants in its creation
or maintenance.”31
But what are the capacities of “mediums”? Hartouni’s analysis
suggests that media are bereft, impoverished in agency—“passive”—and immobile—
“biologically rooted.” But perhaps a medium—like Johnny in The Dead Zone—is pre-
cisely in the middle, neither active nor passive, present nor absent, live nor dead,
here nor there.32 Perhaps media are virtual, on the line. As virtuals, such media do
not lack agency but instead distribute it—they articulate the connections in any
network of actualization. As such, a medium’s promises and threats emerge from
their location in limbo, as go-betweens.
This limbo agency of the virtual resides partially in its capacity
for repetition. At times, Deleuze and Guattari describe the very distinction between
the virtual and the actual in terms of speed and slowness, as actuality arrives in a
kind of interruptive “freeze frame” that brings reference to bear on the multiplicity
of the virtual. These differential speeds can be understood as connectivity, the facility

D o t C o m a
to be repeated in different contexts, an attribute roughly analogous to the quality of
“velocity” in monetarist economics. Betweenness has its benefits—connectivity in-
creases with deterritorialization, while the valence of connection increases until it
undergoes a change in kind—reference is qualitatively other than persuasion, actual-
ity differential of virtuality.
This transformation of a virtual into an actual requires repetition
and it is through iterability (and subsequent distributivity) that virtuals are “selected.”
For even Hartouni’s deployment of the example/sample “Brain-Dead Mother Has
Her Baby” relies on its extraction and repetition. No less than the delivery of the
fetus/baby itself, Hartouni’s mobilization of “Brain-Dead Mother Has Her Baby”
relies on its ability to be cut out of its alleged “location,” much as Hartouni notes
that with the rhetorical operations of video and visualization technology “the live fetal
image of the clinic appears to have been transported into everyone’s living room.”33
Indeed, in this sense, actuality—the emergence of reference—is thoroughly entangled
with virtuality—the capacity for dispersal. This is stated most clearly by Deleuze
and Guattari when they note that “there is no reproduction without genetic drift.”
Such a power of drift, distribution, or delivery is indeed an at-
tribute of media—they function as speedy replicators as well as articulators and are
sometimes contagious enough to sprout, ungovernably, in multiple contexts. More
than an accidental predicate, media entail a primordial dislocation at play with the real.
The virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object—as though
the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though
into an objective dimension.34
In this instance, as in every other, only by being treated in terms of what Deleuze
calls differentiation—a partitioning into articulable, narratable distinctions, “as
though”—can the virtual be rendered. It must be actualized as a virtual, determined
in configurations of space and time that enable it to refer, to become a “problem”
for which actualization, becoming, is the solution. It is through the virtual that the
monstrosity of metamorphosis can be referenced, treated not as a vague promise—of
the tadpole, “maybe it will be a frog”—but as the positivity of becoming. If virtuals
form a hollow of an “objective dimension” where the real has its tendrils, they are
no less complicit with their own delivery by the future, the capacity to be acted
upon. Deleuze describes the differential transformation of virtual into actual through
recourse to the figure of labor—at first of the economic kind, but then through the
embryo:

The destiny and achievement of the embryo is to live the unlivable, to sus-
tain forced movements of a scope which would break any skeleton or tear
ligaments.35
This logically impossible event—living the “unlivable”—pro-
ceeds not through the usual operations of “agency,” “action,” or “strength.” It instead
requires a flexibility, a tremendous facility for difference and a primordial hospital-
ity—egg, nest, hollow. This sensitivity to difference operates in contact with the future:
“They can only be lived . . .”36 It is in this sense that even the virtual is complicit with
the future, and that mediums enable and distribute agency more than they suffer
its lack.
Hence Hartouni’s understanding of the “passive” “biological”
mother must be supplemented with a mapping of the effects of the very “mediums”
she fears are being evacuated of agency. It is exactly the flexibility of mediums—their
ability to be hollowed out, like Johnny, by the future—that makes the arrival of nov-
elty, indeed birth, possible. In comparing possible alternative formulations of “Brain-
Dead Mother Has Her Baby,” Hartouni notes that it is through the disavowal of the
“social activities and meanings on the one hand” of the mother and the amplification
of “biological processes on the other” that the comatose mother is constituted as a
medium. And yet the event of the technologically and rhetorically entangled “Brain-
Dead Mother” is exactly what draws these distinctions into question as oppositions,
suggesting that reproduction has perhaps sprouted more than two hands.37
That’s One Way of Putting It; or, Aha
Dependent on an unforeseeable future, the emergence from a coma is also, of course,
difficult to narrate. Upon awakening, Smith’s doctor informs him that he had been a
“guest” for some time, a locution Smith greets with a snort while responding, “That’s
one way of putting it.” This strange hospitality to which the guest Smith is indebted
is indeed multiple—there are many ways to “put it.” As a guest, Smith occupies an
ethical position distinct from the son or even the patient. Dependent for his life not
on the interiority of a will but on the exteriority of care and a postmodern, machinic
kindness of strangers, Smith’s relation with the doctor is first and foremost an en-
counter of kind-ness—qualitative difference. No “expression” or communicative ex-
change brokers the relation, and even a simulated intersubjectivity can only occur
retroactively. Only after a thoroughly contingent—even miraculous—awakening
can the care and relation of the doctor and Smith be articulated as a relation. Thus
orphaned—of “no relation”—Smith is in some sense, as his mother puts it, “lost,”

D o t C o m a
outside of the rhetorical regime of the family. Yet this “loss” is hardly lacking—in
the meantime, as it were, Smith has plugged into, been connected to, an entire ma-
chinic rhizome.
Smith’s relation to the machines and care that animate him—
perhaps like our relation to cinema—traverses multiple registers, none of which are
fundamentally acts of expression. The turning of his body, the connection of a feed-
ing tube, the administration of a drug—these are recipes or procedures concerned
not with representation or even communication but with a signifying discipline and
desire—the desire to discipline and cultivate Smith’s body back into “life.” Even
after awakening, of course, the discipline continues: therapy and therapists, operations
and drugs, foster the possibility of Smith’s return to “normality.”
Yet this discipline is not confined to technology or even medicine
in the usual sense. The shouts of his physical therapist—“Give me one more lap!”
remind us that the ordering of Smith’s (and Dockery’s) body is also a rhetorical enter-
prise. Cronenberg’s film—perhaps for good reason, as we shall see—offers the pos-
sibility of a line of flight from the maternal register of this rhetoric, as the film engen-
ders, and does not merely express, the syncope of the coma. Even while it attaches the
disturbing vitality of Smith’s “flashes” to the maternal body through the expressive
force of its narrative, a narrative in which the comatose body speaks, the film undoes
any attempt to arrest the ambiguity of the coma. Figured by a cut, a fracture “be-
tween” scenes that is the very MacGuffin of the film, the coma remains uninter-
pretable, a blank that is not a lack. More than “offstage” or “behind the scenes,” the
coma is imaged as an interruption, the very synaptic fissure which makes cinema,
subjectivity, possible—the “gap” or interstice between two cites or sights.38 The
film features, of course, the disciplining of Smith—by the media, as well as his “lost”
familial order—but this discipline instills yet another affect in the viewer: becoming-
comatose. For if the asignifying “interstice” of both the cinematic frame and the
coma—in the dead zone these entities are indiscernible—images nothing but time,
it thwarts interpretation even as it carries out its effects—an encounter with, but not
an expression of, the future. Aha.
At the level of “consciousness,” this encounter literally does not
occur—it registers a blank. And yet on the register of the film’s movement, the very
condition of possibility for a narrative that would attach the life of the coma to the
maternal body, this blank is exuberant production itself, the proliferation of images,
the visualization of multiplicity called cinema. And perhaps the most singular figu-
ration of this interruption is the silent “click” with which I began, the hang up on a
lost mother on the phone, long distance. This hang up cleaves—sticks together and

divides—the maternal body and the coma, as the coma contacts the mother without her
knowledge.
This notion of “contact” extends to the viewer of The Dead Zone.
Steven Shaviro, writing of a notion of cinema as “contagion,” notes that this shift in
the premises of film theory leads away from a fixation on “identification.” “When I
am caught up in watching a film I do not really ‘identify’ in a psychoanalytic sense . . .
It is more the case that I am brought into intimate contact with the images on the
screen by a process of mimesis or contagion.”39 Shaviro, after Benjamin, characterizes
this contact as a “tactile convergence,” an encounter between viewer and image that
implodes any vision that would render the visual in terms of a distance between a
“subject” and an “image.” Instead, the viewer enjoys and suffers a strange intimacy
with the screen. She is composed as a multiplicity, neither inside nor outside the
image, a medium or Möbius body that conducts intensities and flows. Conducting a
coma, The Dead Zone brings the viewer into contact with the blinding, impossible vi-
sion of interruption. It interrupts vision and even consciousness as it induces the
syncope of experiencing oneself being interrupted, becoming-comatose. Shaviro, via
Bataille, describes an “anti-vision” of film that uncannily mimes the very content
and experience of The Dead Zone.
We see that which exceeds the possibility of seeing, that which it is intolerable
to see. And it occurs in a time of repetition, without a living present, a time
that linear narrative cannot fill.40
King’s novel, while not provoking the interruptions that the
rhetorical operations of the film effect, nonetheless allegorizes the encounter between
the strange emergence of life called the coma and any attempt to narrate this gift of
the future. The very experience of the coma—what, in the film, will have been an
interruption, a caesura—is narrated through the tropes of childbirth. If Cronenberg’s
film referenced the maternal body only retroactively, after the return to life, King’s
novel delivers the coma itself as a labor. It is, however a labor not of the mother, but
of the fetus. Narrated in the third person, the comatose character Smith nonetheless
adopts the agency that has been bestowed upon the late-twentieth-century fetus. For
Johnny in a coma, becoming-lively is becoming-fetus.
It began to seem that he was not in a hallway at all anymore but in a room—
almost in a room, separated from it by the thinnest of membranes, a sort of
placental sac, like a baby waiting to be born.41

D o t C o m a
A “baby waiting to be born,” of course, is not a baby at all—it is a fetus. Yet the
becoming-lively of the comatose body shares in the sovereignty of “his majesty,”
proleptically severing the placental sac that is his livelihood, obliterating the future
through his own, impossible, action.42 Almost in a room, a sleepy hollow between
life and death, the sovereign fetus called the comatose body must choose:
Choose, Something inside him whispered. Choose or they’ll choose for you, they’ll
rip you out of this place, whatever and wherever it is, like doctors ripping a baby out
of its mother’s womb by caesarian section.43
This odd persistence of fetal autonomy in the context of the machinic hospitality of
the coma testifies to the difficulties this hybrid life form poses for narrative. It also
attests to the enormous power of a self-birthing discourse of the fetus, a self-birthing
possible only within a historical and rhetorical moment that evaporates maternal
bodies. If no mother’s body is necessary for a fetus, one is surely not required for an
entity that lives off the tropes of the fetus, some machines and some care, “whatever
and wherever it is.”
And yet the maternal body does not simply disappear in the con-
text of the coma—it is cleaved, severed and attached, at a distance. In her labor,
Sarah attaches her maternal body to Johnny’s coma:
[A]t some point in her extremity it occurred to her that she was in the same
hospital as Johnny, and she called his name over and over again. Afterward
she barely remembered this, and certainly never told Walt. She thought she
might have dreamed it.44
Substituting for a more conventional, accidental, and fantasmatic repetition of an
absent lover’s name, this iteration of “Johnny” connects labor to the coma, as if
Sarah could deliver Johnny out of his silence. And yet for all its repetition—one of
the characteristics of technoscientific certainty—this call remains epistemologically
uncertain: “She thought she might have dreamed it.” The maternity of the coma is
thus tangled—both named and, possibly, dreamed, in the placenta and just plain out
of it, in “extremity.”
So too is Johnny’s first experience of his “second sight”—the
recognition that his Doctor’s mother is, indeed, alive—experienced as labor, labor at
a distance, virtual labor.
...a baby, ooooh the labor! the labor is terrible and she needs drugs, morphine, this
JOHANNA BORENTZ, because of the hip, the broken hip, it has mended, it has

gone to sleep, but now it awakes and begins to scream as her pelvis spreads to let the
baby out. one baby. two. and three. and four. they don’t come all at once, no—they
are a harvest of years, they are.
“The Babies,” Johnny lilted, and now he spoke in a woman’s voice,
not his own voice at all. It was the voice of a woman.45
Ventriloquizing maternity, Johnny expresses the pain of birth at a distance. While
narrating the events of the birth in the third person, Johnny eventually becomes-
woman, connecting the coma victim’s becoming-lively rather precisely to the tropes
and experiences of birth, births whose futurity—the “Harvest of Years”—are im-
ploded into a continual labor. Greeted with uncertainty—his doctor does not, at
first, believe—Johnny cleaves the coma unto the maternal body, joining it to the
present and ripping it out of its “place” in a time out of joint, out of pelvis, the dead
zone, virtuality.
While this dead zone is imaged as a cut in Cronenberg’s film—it
is never filled in by narrative, “explained” to the viewer—King’s novel declares it to
be, in some sense, unthinkable. Subject to a battery of tests, Smith’s capacity to
summon images—his imagination—is mapped by an EEG. Asked to think of a pic-
nic table on the left side of a lawn, Smith sees a hammock instead. “It’s the weirdest
thing. I can’t quite . . . seem to think of it. I mean, I know what it is, but I can’t see it
in my mind.”46
This gap or interval in the possibility of imaging is not a loss.
Swapping images for effects, Johnny’s “dead zones”—imagination’s finitude—live at
a distance, virtually, perhaps with his Doctor’s mother. Not simply a blindness traded
for an insight, Smith literally becomes a medium, a site for the collision of virtuality
with actuality. This transformation is easiest to articulate in those instances where
Johnny accesses the future—unseen becomings are stamped on Johnny’s body, as he
is seized by, with, the future, virtuality proleptically becoming actuality. Deleuze and
Guattari note that this passage from the virtual (the realm of concepts) to the actual
(the realm of functions and lived experience) traverses what they call a “dead time.”
It is no longer time that exists between two instants; it is the event that is a
meanwhile (un entre-temps): the meanwhile is not part of the eternal, but
neither is it part of time—it belongs to becoming. The meanwhile, the event,
is always a dead time; it is there where nothing takes place, an infinite await-
ing that is already infinitely past, awaiting and reserve. This dead time
does not come after what happens; it coexists with the instant or time of the
accident . . . 47

D o t C o m a
Hence the impossibility of imaging this “dead zone” or “time of
the [Johnny’s] accident”: the virtual, far from being opposed to the actual, constitutes
it. But it is of another order, a register accessed only through a discontinuity. To
move from the virtual to the actual is to become, a traversal imaged only through
the intermezzo of sheer difference, the shattering, continual variation that is the inter-
stice of film, the coma, or, as King implies of Smith’s brain “a television. It is on, but
not receiving a station.”48 Elsewhere, Deleuze and Guattari map this discontinuity
in terms of the connection of (desiring) machine to (desiring) machine:
Far from being the opposite of continuity, the break or interruption condi-
tions this continuity: it presupposes or defines what it cuts into as an ideal
continuity. This is because, as we have seen, every machine is a machine of a
machine. The machine produces an interruption of the flow only insofar as
it is connected to another machine that supposedly produces this flow.49
Rather than positing a dialectic in which each interruption is configured within the
same, this diagram of disconnection isolates the mechanism through which maternity
is both referenced—virtually—and dislocated—actually—in discursive renderings
of the coma. Mobilized in order to narrate the eruption of life out of a machine, ma-
ternity becomes iterable, citable, and detached from any specific maternal body.
The very disturbance to family the tropes of maternity would suture—life sprouting
from technology, getting distributed—enables maternity’s detachment from any cor-
poreality whatsoever—the mother remains virtual in the hang-up. This virtual re-
turn of maternity—once evaporated by the discourse on fetal rights, now crucial to
the narrative of the coma—is actualized not in terms of a multiplicity called “mother-
ing,” but as a connector to another machine: family. If the virtual maternal—“Brain-
Dead Mother Has Her Baby”—operates at least in part through its capacity for dif-
ferential repetition, this repetition makes available both a hybridization and a
reproduction.
Familial Futures
Networked with other films and novels of the period—such as Michael Crichton’s
adaptation of the Robin Cook novel, Coma—The Dead Zone’s investment of the coma
victim with the family becomes articulable within the matrix of tensions surrounding
the “neomort” or “living cadaver.”50 More than a metaphysical distinction, the emer-
gence of brain death was associated with the increased “procurement” of organs for
transplantation. This tension—the uncertainty of determining death in the age of life
support and the need for such certainty in an organ donation market—comported

Crichton’s Coma in the form of organ harvesting—the ascription of brain death to
otherwise healthy patients for the purpose of organ acquisition. The Dead Zone,
rather than manifesting an anxiety of the body’s new possibilities as commodity, nar-
rates the relentlessly futural character of corporeality, a futurity most easily accessed
through the donation of the “living body” that houses the “dead” brain to others, a
future continually referenced in materials that recruit organ donors.51
This future—another body that might live through organs of
the deceased—has a particularly familial flavor, as the family is both a locus of the
decision to donate organs and, sometimes, their recipient. When Monte Burns, the
brutal but affectless capitalist on The Simpsons, learned he had a son, he failed in his
attempt to simulate the love of a parental bond but remarked, with great sentimen-
tality, “It’s good to know. . . that there’s another kidney out there for me.”52
Perhaps the location of this sample—a flickering animated image
transduced to video—evinces the character of this new form of life maintenance.
Living tissues no longer reside within the confines of an allegedly autonomous body,
but are instead contingently networked with differential futures, futures of animation.
New segments of life are being produced through the organization of donation and
the dosing of immune systems. This production of life—“The Gift of Life”—emerges
only through the transforming of selves—futurity emerges for the transplant recip-
ient only through the disciplining of the very contours of the self, a self sculpted
both of drugs and discourse, a rhetorical and pharmaceutical hybrid.53
But this futural character of contemporary corporeality—its abil-
ity to act in a future, without consciousness—poses severe challenges to any system
that would procure and allocate human organs. If such dispensations are to emerge
from a citizen, such subjects must enjoy the proleptic ability to act in the future,
after one’s death. In other words, organs must become concepts—treatable and artic-
ulable in terms of their ability to become rather than maintain.54 They are treated in
terms of their capacity for difference.
This extension of agency past the life of the subject paradoxically
depends upon the agency of the family. For if the body is to be a transaction site in
the absence of a subject, it is the family that brokers, executes, this transaction. The
very death of the subject that enables the gift of organ donation thwarts any testi-
mony of the gift’s propriety. Thus the family—and not merely writing, a contract, a
donor card—is called forth to ventriloquize the brain-dead subject: “To be an Organ
& Tissue donor, even if you’ve signed something, you must tell your family now, so
they can carry out your wishes later.”55

D o t C o m a
This testimony to the future perfect desires of the comatose—
“This is what she would have wanted”—is not, of course, without its share of ambi-
guity, an incapacity which continually haunts and perhaps thwarts organ donation.
In the context of the termination of life support—the proverbial “pulling of the
plug”—this ambiguity has lead to the invention of a new speech act in the United
States, Australia, and Europe: the living will.
Thus while it is clear that the technologies of life support and
the legal armature of brain death mark a decisive diagram of subjectivity—even in
brain death, a subject persists, variously entangled with both the law and machines—
comas also mark new configurations of power that emerge out of the “family.” Even
as the technologies of life support and organ transplantation—the twin vectors that
compose the coma as such a site of anxiety—make possible new modes of human
hybridization, it is the discourse of the family that ensures the continual attach-
ment of a point of view, or “center,” to the distributed rhizome of growth that em-
beds comatose bodies. Indeed, the value of the family almost seems to emerge out of
its ability to govern the proliferating disturbances that such technologies pose for
“life.”56
This position of families as the “governing” body for coma pa-
tients is outlined in a recent court decision in Pennsylvania, where the right to ter-
minate life support from a patient in a permanent vegetative state (coma) is granted
to families, even in the absence of a living will or “advance health care declaration.”
Note that this remarkable power of interruption is withheld from women themselves,
as an advance health care declaration becomes null in the event that a woman is sus-
pected of pregnancy.
A declaration by a pregnant woman will not become effective unless a physi-
cian has determined that the life-sustaining treatments either (a) will not per-
mit the live birth of the unborn child, (b) will be physically harmful to the
pregnant woman, or (c) would cause pain to the pregnant woman.57
Here the agency of women’s bodies is both referenced and obliterated. Literally cleft
from her own “living will,” the proleptic desire of woman becomes null and void, or
at least without effects, not “effective.” Under this rubric, the agency of (possibly)
premenopausal women becomes haunted by the specter of pregnancy.
At the same time, this cleavage of the living will from Pennsyl-
vanian women reinscribes the limbo agency of the maternal body itself. Capable of
birth, capable of pain, the maternal body is not simply erased in the desire to foster

the fetus. Instead, it is cleaved, detached from the past desire of a woman and attached
to the future capacities of the maternal body, capacities that, by definition, are vir-
tual—attached to the future as much as a mother and life support—and not actual.
Thus it is the virtual maternal that is detached from the body of a desiring woman, a
virtuality that enables the literal propagation of a family even as this propagation is
detached from the specificity of any individual female subject. Somebody in Pennsyl-
vania read “Brain-Dead Mother Has Her Baby.”
The emergence of a body that uncannily lives up to Heidegger’s
dictum concerning the “essence” of technology—the coma is Nothing, technologi-
cal—would seem to remind us even more forcefully of Spinoza’s refrain: We don’t
know what a body can do.58 Endowed with new capacities of distribution, contempo-
rary bodies cultivate futures through routes other than reproduction. Connected with
life by machines as well as so-called biological multiplicities, human and otherwise,
the networked body of the coma relates not to a future of knowledge, but of contin-
gency. A virtual corporeality, the comatose body is, in the phrasing of philosopher
Elizabeth Grosz, “befallen by the future.”59 Its genealogy is, then, uncertain, available
for difference, aleatory to the assemblage of family that would send a name, and the
flesh to bear it, into the future. The comatose body encounters a future that cannot
be divined—no reliable algorithm exists to signify its future, to predict with precision
the actualization of its virtuality.
He tried to protest, to tell her that he didn’t want to do great works, heal, or
speak in tongues, to divine the future . . . He tried to tell her, but his tongue
wouldn’t obey his brain.60
In the silence of the coma, betwixt tongue and brain, a dead zone,
the American family speaks. Despite the much-noted “decline” of the family and the
threats that various postindustrial configurations allegedly pose to it, the family ulti-
mately governs the comportment and treatment of the comatose body. If the co-
matose body troubles our understandings of the medical and legal spaces of life and
death, it is through the discourse of the family that this odd, resistant body becomes
governable, even divined.
“Here’s Johnny!”; or, Textual Delivery
At the Westfall Health Care Center in Brighton, New York, a twenty-nine-year-old
woman, comatose for ten years in the wake of a car accident, developed a swelling of
the belly, indicating a pregnancy. One media account narrated the 1996 event in
terms of a textual materialization or delivery: “It is as if a particularly diabolical

D o t C o m a
textbook problem for budding ethicists has been transposed to grim reality in upstate
New York.”61 What was remarkable about this horrifying rape was its immediate man-
agement by the discourse of familial reproduction, as the woman’s family determined
that she would want to bear the child.
The New York woman had been a devout Roman Catholic. Says Ellen Mos-
kowitz, a lawyer and ethicist at the Hastings Center, “It seems reasonable to
conclude this is the kind of decision she would have wanted.”62
By continuously invoking the values of the famed yet anonymous woman in terms of
the discourse of pro-life, the family was able to render a paradoxical decision “against
abortion”—paradoxical because the condition of possibility of abortion was itself
life support, itself the result of another incalculable decision. Carrying the child to
term—with the help of life support—was continually warranted through recourse
to the woman’s pro life values, without which such a birth out of life maintenance
would have been, in Hartouni’s phrasing, “virtually unintelligible.”
And yet perhaps it is only virtually that this birth is made possible.
The delivery is entangled with the enunciation of the woman’s family—it is literally
enabled by a statement, along with some other machines. The statement or com-
mand—“Do not abort!”—is utterable, in this instance, only to the extent that it can
articulate the alleged desires of the woman. These desires are neither here nor there,
embedded in the discourses and practices of the past and yet strangely effective on
the present and the future. The family functions as a relay—or ventriloquism—of
desire.
As desires, these discourses and practices do not refer—they are
promises of a capacity to be affected and perhaps transformed. “I want” is less a refer-
ence to a lack than a sensitivity to an other. So too is this sensitivity itself character-
ized by its citationality, a capacity for the repetition and drift of geography and time.
It is in this sense that the discourse of the woman in question is virtual. Indeed, it is
the actualization of the woman’s desires as virtual that enables this birth, as her desires
are treated as detachable from any particular actualization, “what she would have
wanted.”
And how are these virtuals actualized? The instantiation of the
woman’s desires takes place through both the enunciation and narratives of family.
The woman’s ghost is summoned to speak, a living ghost. This ghost is provocative
of, but does not represent, the past. An uncanny stranger hailed as much by the
citable character of the familial narrative as it is by the life-support mechanisms
that enable its development, the baby sprouts out of familial discourse, a discursive

budding or hybrid that allows for the reproduction of family “value” into the future,
a fleshly delivery that emerges partially from an utterance.
Crucial to the decision to enable this birth, the first live birth
from a continually comatose body, was the ascription of agency to the mother even
as it was erased. Doctors noted that
the natural forces of labor could possibly be intact in the woman, but without
voluntary cooperation in pushing, the delivery would require forceps or a
vacuum.63
As with our earlier phone call, the connection to the mother is established, but with-
out her knowledge. Familial production operates here not as the reproduction of indi-
viduals but as the proliferation of the familial itself, the actualization of virtual enti-
ties or values bound not to consciousness but to the production of other live bodies,
live bodies that emerge out of the rhetorical, virtual space of “decision.” These remark-
able pragmatics of speech emerge out of a virtual, familial response to that old, sup-
posedly enigmatic psychoanalytic puzzler: What does woman want?
Ungovernable by the taxonomies or articulations of medicine,
the comatose body renders not merely another human, but an occasion for the exer-
cise of familial power. The nonstop public performance we call family, rather than
wounded by the strife of the uncanny space between life and death, is constituted by
it. The family speaks, it decides, and children are born. With this child—a two-pound,
eleven-ounce boy born March 18, 1996, let us call him “Johnny”—a new speech act
is born, a discursive birth that performatively constitutes the flesh of the future: “We
are Family.”

E I G H T

Recipe: Segment must be accompanied by large blue and white Igloo cooler with mysterious
contents. Options include: Organ Piñata, a large plaster of paris kidney, painted pink with
red swirls. Spray paint will do. Piñata is stuffed with tiny candy bars wrapped in organ
“donor” cards that sign rights for future sale of organs over to Wetwares Inc. Organ Rover:
Igloo cooler mounted on toy monster truck, pursuing improbable trajectories linked by a
global positioning system and Dr. Jack Kervorkian’s pager.
this segment will emerge out of a problem, the problem of how to give some-
thing that you quite simply don’t have. Perhaps only a scholastic—one who owns a
franchise on the production of distinctions—would be troubled by this problem.
“How many absences can you fit on the head of a pin with angels dancing on it?”
they might puzzle. “How could you possibly balance anything on a pin that wasn’t
there?”
Nonetheless, you see the problem. From a certain conceptual
perspective, you just can’t do it. Giving, for example, can only emerge from the
given, that which is already there. You know the story. It’s tired. You go to give
something, like a giving of yourself, and it’s just not there. So to give this story
some spin, I’ll make it give, to see what the giving entails.
“Take My Bone Marrow, Please”:
The Community in Which
We Have Organs in Common

An Initial Public Offering
I am thinking of starting a company. I often do this in between moments of thinking
up screenplay ideas that I will work out later. I take sociologist of science Bruno
Latour at his word, that to think technoscience is an expensive game. The skeptic—
although why should it only be the skeptic who would be interested in such an enter-
prise, how about a hobbyist?—has to amass enough capital to test out specific claims
of a technoscience, such as the effectiveness of an immunosuppressor like Cyclo-
sporine or the veracity of a genetic map of Cannabis indica. In short, the skeptic must
build a lab.
I love this vision of a democratic science—let a hundred labs
bloom. I see neighborhood labs competing for space with ping-pong tables in the few
community centers and organizations we have left. I have a vision of DNA sequencers
crammed in church basements, trailing-edge technology that allows Girl Scouts to
test out theories of alien abduction, producing counternarratives about the genetics
of cancer. In place of conspiracy theory we will have a multiplicity of technoscience.
Of course, the whole reason these sequencers are on the junk
heap is that they are trailing edge. Sure, we could produce counternarratives, but the
truth, ah the truth would probably still be “out there,” somewhere else where more
money and information clusters. So maybe, just maybe, we need to line up some
capital with these packs of hobbyists, Water Buffalo lodge members, bridge clubs,
women’s shelters, mummers, yes, even Masons, and hack technoscience. I have even
approached ISIS, that gang of counternarrative machines out of Amherst that cleans
up toxins, studies multiple chemical sensitives, the future of cryptography, privacy,
becoming, and they said yeah, we could use the dough, too.
So here is the plan for my new business: I want to start the first
futures market in human organs. Get paid now for a future interest in your possibly
healthy organs. Only to be harvested after death, of course. So far, I have some de-
cent ideas about how to get such a system up and running—this idea is hardly my
invention—but I am going to need a lot of help. I need you to help me. In helping
me or resisting this scheme, think about the difference a distributed technoscience
would make, one in which the means of knowledge production were as deterritorial-
ized as capital itself, in which the means to produce or resist narratives of techno-
science moved across the globe as quickly as cubic zirconium on the Home Shop-
ping Network, where technoscience “kiosks” had more than Web access but entire
labs, and the signs out front of proliferating franchises boasted, speaking of their
narratives, claims, and outrageous arguments they have produced, “Billions and Bil-
lions Told . . .”

“ T a k e M y B o n e M a r r o w , P l e a s e ”
Of course the problem is that if this deterritorialization of techno-
science—what Deleuze and Guattari have characterized as a nomad science1—is to
take place, bodies too must be deterritorialized. Not that much flesh hasn’t passed
through the ultracentrifuges of late, late, late, late capitalism already. But a short-term
supply-side shock has overtaken organ donation: as technologies of organ transplan-
tation have improved drastically, so too has demand for human organs increased, even
as donation rates have been relatively flat.
But if the deterritorialization of organs allegedly proper to the
body has been snagged by the identity practices of the present, this tangle is involved
with the piety and privilege of “life.” Organ donation discourse is bogged down by the
sappy, oedipal recuperation of organ donation as the “gift of life.” In the Transplant
Games—that sporting event where one is actually required to take drugs—transplant
recipients receive their medals from donor families—family members of those who
have given their organs in death such that others might vault, sprint, swim, and live.
This tactic of oedipalizing the organ—plugging it into a system of reproduction, the
giving of an organ is the giving of “life”—seems to have reached its limit, though. The
economy of organ transplantation is an economy of scarcity—thousands die each year
waiting for someone else to die so they won’t. So before the American postoedipal
body can be turned into a futures market for a distributed technoscience, new tactics
must be invented to deterritorialize bodies coded by autonomy. This segment is an
early effort to effect this deterritorialization. It is my shtick for (ad)venture capital.
I begin cautiously, with bone marrow, a human tissue that is not—
like other human tissues such as kidneys and livers—in an economy of scarcity. This
is so for a very specific reason—the giving of bone marrow is not a zero-sum game.
The human body is an exuberant bone marrow production. So I begin by trying a
new tactic in the liberation of marrow, a tactic that draws not on some notion of a
gift of life that sutures finitude in the face of that thing we all allegedly have in com-
mon—death—but one that draws on the laughter and difference that attends to the
experience of the permeability of the body, its character as a multiplicity entangled
with other multiplicities.
The Community in Which We Have Organs In Common
You know, where I live, things have gotten out of hand. Take my bone marrow.
Please. No really, I mean it. Take it. Take it now. I mean, I have a cooler for you
right here, you’ve seen the footage on TV, technicians running—very carefully—with
what looks like a lunchbox, mist streaming off the lid. Not really something you’d
want to eat, but hey maybe you can get together with it another way. You know.

I wish you would take my bone marrow. I mean really. It’s not
such a big deal—I am all the bone marrows in history. Take all you want, we’ll make
more. My marrow and your marrow, they get together. See what I mean? In the
meantime—To-marrow, even—more bone marrow. For me!
So take it. What are you waiting for? I know, there’s just no
money in it. You just don’t hear rumors about guys waking up naked after a night on
the town, sitting in a tub full of ice, with a hangover and no bone marrow. No, you
just don’t hear people worrying about Mickey Mantle leapfrogging some poor sick
fuck from North Dakota for a bone marrow. Bone marrow don’t get no respect, you
ask me.
But hey, take it anyway. You never know.
So you probably, frankly, don’t want it. I can’t give this shit away
sometimes. But still take it. Cause if you don’t take it, what the fuck am I gonna do
with it? Nothing. Me—I got plenty. And there’s more where that comes from, I
mean we can make arrangements. You know what I mean.
So you’re thinking, okay, maybe I just will. Don’t mind if I do.
But wait just a minute. Take just one minute. I said to take it, yeah, but that was
then. And this is now, old marrow stealer. And I say you can’t have it.
Just kidding. Calm down, it was a joke. I wouldn’t change my
mind, not like that. You can have it. I said you can have it.
But can you really take it? That’s what I think, I think you can’t
fucking take it. No way. Can’t take it. That’s what I hear about you.
“Says who?” says you. I says so. “I” says you can’t take it. “Me,”
that’s who. Mr. Subject of the sentence over here. I says you can’t take it. Never.
Take it anyway, would you? Just take my bone marrow, please!
No, you just can’t take it. I’d have to give it to you now, wouldn’t
I? I would have to say—as I keep reminding you—“Go ahead. Take my bone marrow.
Please.”
Oh, no, not gonna take that from me, you think to yourself. I
don’t take that from nobody. Rather—since you never know when a grammar cop is
around—I’ll take it from nobody. I’ve read up on this stuff. I know about the Merchant
of Venice, the pound of flesh. One pound of meat and a heap of trouble. No way.
Don’t give me any of that.
Just take it, ok? I was polite enough. I said “please.” I don’t want
to give you any trouble. Just the bone marrow, and nothing but. All you need is a
large needle—is there a doctor in the house? There’s no need take anything from
me. You couldn’t if you tried. But I’ll give it to you.

“ T a k e M y B o n e M a r r o w , P l e a s e ”
“You” still don’t get it. No, you just don’t get it. You “just” don’t.
What you get is a bone marrow, sure. But there are other considerations. Like maybe
“you” aren’t the one that gets it. “You” aren’t one of the ones that gets it ever. No
“one” gets it. But sure, I’m giving out more than I am taking in. So some body must
get it.
Nobody.
Well, you’re thinking, if I can’t get it, then nobody should. It’s
only fair that nobody should get what I don’t.
So good. We understand each other at last. Nobody gets my
bone marrow. So take it. Please.
I mean somebody might as well. If nobody wants it, you might as
well take it. I know. You’re doing a double take now. Thinking I might be on the take
or something. Like now he wants to give me some marrow. But what about before?
I said, “Take my bone marrow. Please.” Really I did. But you
couldn’t take it. Now that I said nobody could have it, I thought—for surely nobody
could take it—I might as well give it. But not to “you.” Oh, if we’re a match, we’ll
take it and put it to good use. Or we’ll give it to somebody else. But not “you.”
I know, I know, cheer up. “You” never get anything. “I” know
how it is. But the way this whole bone marrow thing works—and it works, really it
does—is that “you” can’t take it. I can give it. Or can “I”? How can “I” give what
nobody took?
Yeah, yeah, the needle. But I’m not gonna give myself a needle.
No way. That’s somebody else’s job. Not mine. Which means, within our little give
and take, that somebody’s going to give me a needle. A big, fat one.
Shit. I really can’t take needles.
Oh, I’ve given blood, yeah, had plenty of allergy shots in my
youth, a huge shot of painkiller when I broke my leg at age two. And I dig—really—
those moments in junky films—like Drug Store Cowboy or Bad Lieutenant—when the
camera highlights the needle’s entry into an arm. I mean, how long did that scene in
Bad Lieutenant last? It was the sex scene of the movie. Talk about pleasing.
Obviously, you’re saying.
But I can’t take needles. So somebody is going to have to give
me a shot, a big one. And before that, there will be all this paperwork to be done.
Have I been to a malarial zone lately?
Have I?
So along with a needle, somebody’s gonna have to put me under a
bit of surveillance, give me a looking over. Which I can take. Really. No problem.

Test me for HIV? You wanna know where I’ve been these past few years? Childhood
diseases? Already told you about the broken leg, but that doesn’t matter. When do I
get to tell you about my allergies? And I’m a vegetarian, you know.
So take my bone marrow. Please. I feel like maybe we are becom-
ing friends. Take my marrow—if you take it, if I give it, we’ll have that going for us.
And it’ll have nothing to do with “you” or “me.” Cause it was never mine in the first
place. Please?

N I N E

wetware /wet’weir/ n. pl.
[prob. from the novels of Rudy Rucker] 1. The human nervous system, as opposed to
computer hardware or software. “Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers.”
2. Human beings (programmers, operators, administrators) attached to a computer system,
as opposed to the system’s hardware or software. 3. ’Taint software, ’taint hardware
(Doyle, 2002). See liveware, meatware.
The Online Hacker Jargon File,
modified by Richard Doyle
(1.0)
every few months, my mailbox houses an improbable visitor. Transplant Video
Journal, a simulated television news program produced by Novartis Pharmaceuti-
cals, finds itself sandwiched among surreal garden catalogs, earnest supplications
from vaguely left nonprofit organizations, bills, and postcards from friends working
hard to keep in touch.1 The sight of the tape in my mailbox, wrapped in the prover-
bial plain brown wrapper, its return address cryptic, excites. My father, after all, was
a mail order pioneer.
Wetwares; or,
Cutting Up a Few Aliens

(2.0)
The small bowel is not the most transportable configuration of human tissue. More
an ecology than a well-defined, autonomous organ, the small bowel teems with a
zoology of fauna that carry out the intricate and thankless tasks of human digestion.
Beyond the mechanics of peristalsis and the transformative action of saliva and stom-
ach acids, human digestion is outsourced to various stains of bacteria.
Thus, unlike many of its corporeal neighbors—kidney, liver,
heart—the small bowel is transplanted only with much difficulty. According to
United Network for Organ Sharing, fewer than three hundred small bowel transplants
have ever been performed. A xenograft, small bowel transplants raise the question of
the identity of the donor: an entire inhuman ecology is being deterritorialized.
(3.0)
I have been working all day in my office, my usual daytime habitat. Sometimes I
feel like a cop, surrounded by stale coffee, continually eating sandwiches at my desk,
interrupting each new task with a more recent “emergency.” Usually, though, I just
stare at a continually changing screen for most of the day, pausing to argue, joke,
and respond with my students and colleagues in the classroom, hallway, or office.
My eyes burn from the optical gymnastics of font and pixel. Bausch and Lomb
Computer Eye Drops are the ticket for this media burn. They coat, soothe, and pro-
tect my eyes with a formula designed for the stress of today’s optically saturated
work place.
(4.0)
To “deterritorialize” something, the way some authors tell the story, is to connect an
entity to elsewhere. A hand deterritorializes a tree branch when it becomes a tool for
digging. Disconnected from a tree, its end becomes pointed, sharpened in an en-
counter with the earth it would transform; forest becomes farmland connected to
maize, becomes pasture, burgers grown in the former rainforest are routed via drive-
thru windows into waiting stomachs, a small bowel is transplanted. Some organisms
deterritorialize through reproduction—a maple seed helicopters elsewhere, giving
the lie to the notion that plants are motionless. Others also induce movement through
rhetorical transactions: bee semiotics—an iterable dance—establish a flow of nectar
to the territorialized hive, the promise of payment vectors spices to Northern Europe
from Indonesia. Money goes from one account to another. Sometimes, it is in more
than one place at once, particularly if one of the places is the Grand Caymans.

W e t w a r e s
(5.0)
The screen is an immaculate blue, an image of waiting. I once toured the CNN
news studio, where I became fascinated by the blue felt background that the meteor-
ologist gestured toward as she indicated a virtual low pressure system here and an
invisible radar photo there. I, of course, saw nothing but blue. On a blue background,
everything seems promising, an icon of the virtual to come. A button on the remote
is pushed and the blue is overtaken by black.
(6.0)
In recent years, computers have been radically deterritorialized as they became hooked
up to networks and webs. Personal computers emerged from their basements and
closets and became telecommunicative devices enabled by the enormous growth of
the Internet. The World Wide Web—a hypertext system designed for organizing
research and communication at a high-energy physics lab—was itself deterritorial-
ized from its Swiss milieu, sprouting into the entertainment-cum-commerce-cum-
research tool it is. Emphasis on the cum.
(7.0)
As soon as the image arrives, it cuts itself open, slowly peeling back a layer above the
“first” image. The cut—in the middle of the frame, backgrounded by fuzzy bio-
medical scenes—opens into an opened body, a gloved hand probing and stroking
layers of opened abdominal flesh. “We’ll go into the operating room for a small
bowel transplant,” Wayne Armstrong, our host, tells us. I wonder just who, or what,
is receiving the transplant.
(8.0)
It is by now a commonplace that this deterritorialization—the growth of computer
networks as acentered, distributed webs, networks that, once connected, aren’t “any-
where” in particular—emerged, in part, out of the strategic anticipations of defense
intellectuals. DARPANET—the primordial growth of connectivity that would become
the Internet—was built to distribute the knowledge base that made possible the de-
sign and testing of nuclear weapons. In this scenario, a network of computers would
enable weapons design to proceed even in the face of a strike on any one of the com-
puters. Networks emerged as proleptic adaptations to the continual specter of nuclear
destruction. They did so by becoming redundant.

During this frenzied connection of computer to computer, some
writers have speedily rendered this new distributed technology in terms of its impact
on our selves. “Like a chip factory running flat out, the American self plops off
the conveyor-belt with wired flesh.”2 The appropriately named Krokers plot the
technobirthing of this American self according to a global software update called
late capitalism: “The American Algorithm? That’s America as the Operating System
for global culture at the beginning of the 3rd millenium.”3 Here the earth itself,
when it’s not busy getting in drag and simulating a superorganism so that it might
pull off the Gaia routine and fool evolutionary biologists, atmospheric scientists,
and new age ecofeminists, logs on to every cognitive dissonance and alimentary
disturbance of the American psyche. The surface of the earth—the skin disease
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra characterized as “man”4—swarms with the most banal
episodes of human consciousness: “writing software is actually like writing out in
code what it means to be an American.”5 This cognitive excretion—what is inside,
comes out—downloads the American subjectivity franchise into a global flow. Epi-
sodes of Melrose Place are folded into Java applets, secret formulae for McDonald’s
special sauce find their way into an algorithmic handshake among modems, plans
for MX Missile deployment get pasted into a subroutine that renders menu options
in Windows 95, the notional missile defense project is launched.6 The virtuality
that is the American psyche, the Krokers note with horror, implodes into a nause-
ating collision with an entire Cosmos: Earth become Disney. Planet Hollywood.
Universities.
(9.0)
There is a soil fungus that, properly treated, allows humans to tolerate the flesh of
others. It enables a graft of an alien organ, donated or purchased flesh. Cyclosporine
nurtures the great network of organ procurement and transplantation that now gen-
erates thousands of transplantations in the United States alone. These newly trans-
portable human organs are grown, then, in a medium of Cyclosporine. They emerge
out of an ecology of fungus.
Fungi are themselves strange synecdoches for a network; spores
emerge out of the fruiting mycelium, a massively connective network of fuzz often
grown in your refrigerator—old tomato paste, a tired piece of cheese, leftovers.
Spores deterritorialize the mycelium, propagating it through time. The dense spatial
connectivity of the mycelium is compressed and launched through, into, the future.
Time travel . . .

W e t w a r e s
(10.0)
Writer William S. Burroughs located a remarkable capacity of texts to encounter the
future—their capacity to be grafted or cited into another context, text, conversation,
or dream. Burroughs was repulsed by conventional concepts of immortality—what
he called “vampire schemes”—as the desire for stasis, me me me me me me me.
Burroughs saw both heterosexual reproduction and Christianity as viral ecologies of
the same, the worst habits of a human species at an impasse. Burroughs favored in-
stead the hybridity of alliances with familiars both technological and biological. Bur-
roughs sought to accentuate and cultivate the strange facility of texts and selves to
mean and even do something other.7
(11.0)
Part of the terror of the Krokers’ cyberhorror Theme Park Earth is its irreversibility:
“You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.” The virtual becomes
ubiquitous, a roach motel of simulacra from which it is impossible to exit. Inside,
we suffer a nostalgia for feeling, a longing for the natural. Unlike the America of
old, there’s no loving or leaving it. The transformation of America from a nation to
a set of algorithms—“The Global Operating System”—is, for the Krokers, a revo-
lution of artifice, a negation of corporeality in a decade of cannibalism: “the flesh-
eating 90s.”
But perhaps the Krokers’ worry over selves is itself in need of an
update. It’s coded for a capitalism based on repetitive production of goods and ser-
vices, the industrial moment of scarcity and demand. The “conveyor-belt” motif
through which the Krokers render the contemporary diagnosis of self belongs to a
moment of linear production, homogenous quality, time rendered into quantity. A
self that punches the clock arrives, disciplined, to enact one action after another, a
temporal series of events—being silent, disciplined, and, above all, in motion—and
takes breaks, loses limbs, periodically rests, takes vacations. The jitself—just in time—
is not delivered on anything as sequential as a conveyor “belt”: It is catastrophic,
suddenly emerging between the nodes of a network.
(12.0)
The peeling image on the screen provokes something like vertigo. From here on, it’s
image all the way down. The installation of the cut layers the image, revealing not
an image below the other but a grafting of one onto another, an accretion. The cut
into the video image connects only to more layers, stratified flesh, from outside to

inside. The image is exposed in its grafting to flesh; it becomes an algorithm, a
recipe for the very connection of image and body: Cut!
(13.0)
Pools and canals reflected excrement mixed with flowers—story of absent legs up the
tarnished mirror—In a rusty privy youth bends over—faint drums of memory on his back—
green boy of broken glaciers and skin instructions . . .
William S. Burroughs
The Ticket that Exploded
Still, if the Krokers’ map of “wired flesh” is keyed to the legend of homogenous quan-
titative time installed with the industrial moment, their understanding of flesh as a
cluster of algorithms resonates with the encounters this infomercial is attempting to
narrate and enact. Wetwares titles an encounter with flesh as a refrain, a repetition of
algorithms or recipes of sufficient complexity that only through instantiation can they
be experienced. Corporeality names an experience of materiality that is literally in-
conceivable; only by doing it, as the shoe company named for a missile named for a
Greek goddess might put it, can it be done. Mathematician Rudy Rucker names those
patterns “inconceivable” entities that are too complex to reproduce in detail.8 Wet-
wares are inconceivable not because they sublimely exceed any reduction or represen-
tation but because they quite simply cannot be modeled in advance. They cannot, like a
complex algorithm, be separated from their enactment. Less lines than flows, wetwares
are continually encountering drifts and turbulence as they slosh through time. Less
iterations than itinerations, becomings, only as transformations shall ye know them.
(14.0)
For Burroughs, immortality—a grafting to the future—was to be found not in time
but in space, through the shattering of a self into becomings.
We made thousands of cut-ups. When you cut and arrange words on a page,
new words emerge . . . The word “drafted,” as into the army, moved into a
context of blueprints or contracts, gives an altered meaning. New words and
altered meanings are implicit in the process of cutting up, and could have
been anticipated. Other results were not expected. When you experiment
with cut-ups over a period of time, some of the cut and rearranged texts
seem to refer to future events.9

W e t w a r e s
(15.0)
Imagine not being able to eat. Not just for a few hours or days, but for years. People in
need of small bowel transplants have one thing in common: They can no longer use their
own intestine and rely totally on intravenous feeding for survival.
Wayne Armstrong,
host of Video Transplant Journal
I find it impossible to obey the narrator. I am simply unable to “imagine” such an
oral blockade. The ecology of my mouth connects to the affect of hunger, my lungs
with the sting and dose of smoke. I have been on IVs and lost heroin addicts to needles,
but as a relation of my body to the outside, hunger is territorialized onto my mouth
and stomach.
On the other hand, the imperative “imagine” does make me panic.
(16.0)
The late writer William S. Burroughs rendered both the narrative of and the experi-
ence with corporeality as a set of becomings. The Earth, in Burroughs’s view, had
become a shithouse, an endless swirl of commodity junkies addicted to buying and
selling the same old shit, shutting down the “soft machines” by transforming them
into need franchises. Junkies were only the most crystalline—and perhaps the most
ethical—species of human overtaken by habit, repetition, and the worship of lack. In
the face of the beautiful, exhausted human repetitions of violence and destruction,
Burroughs welcomed an eruption of the alien and the inhuman that would disturb
the very borders of experience. His own method of the cut-up was a disciplining of
authorship that might allow what he characterized as the “Third Mind” to be en-
countered through that most humanist of technologies: the book. The introduction
of chance operations into the writing of such novels as The Soft Machine, The Ticket
that Exploded, and Nova Express marked an attempt to articulate human experience
not in terms of its repetitions and its closures but of its continual variations, its con-
tingent, complicit itinerations. The very borders of the human body—and those of
the book—were mapped in terms of an oozing fluidity: “Shlup Shlup Shlup.”10
Burroughs’s work was thus continually and differentially engaged with the interrup-
tion of human experience, an introduction to posthumanity. Filled with “blasts of si-
lence,” his texts cultivate a reader who can shut up long enough to mutate. In the si-
lence, Burroughs offered recipes for becoming:11

Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How to Book. . . . Black insect lusts open into
vast, otherplanet landscapes. . . . How-To extend levels of experience by open-
ing the door at the end of a long hall. . . . Doors that open only in Silence. . . .
Naked Lunch demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his
own pulse . . . 12
Swapping redemption for becoming, only mutation can save us now.
(17.0)
I am waiting for the money shot. The image of the stroked layered flesh of the ab-
dominal wall is itself interrupted by an edit: A man walks slowly across an airport
tarmac with a blue igloo cooler. According to an anthropologist I spoke with at a
conference, some vegetarians feel odd about receiving donor organs. Some meat
eaters also feel a cannibalist repulsion to the incorporation of another’s flesh. All the
more odd that organ procurement agencies should carry these “gifts of life” in a
lunch box. Who or what is being fed? Since when was a human organ part of a bal-
anced diet?
(18.0)
Burroughs’s composition of an algorithmic or how-to art renders bodies themselves
as clusters of memory and instruction—“faint drums of memory on his back—green
boy of broken glaciers and skin instructions . . .”—and Burroughs’s practice emerges
contiguously to the molecular biological understandings of living systems as infor-
matic economies. As in Burroughs’s work, organisms, in this view, were articulated
not as sites of autonomous growth or development, but as topoi of informatic ex-
change. The teleonymic characterization of organisms—their only purpose is repli-
cation of their replicative cores, DNA—resulted, in its most extreme form, in an
oddly Burroughsian picture of “soft machines” inhabited by viral entities with their
own parasitic agendas. Biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, recasts humans as
lumbering robots for the deterritorialization and propagation of DNA. Here flesh
emerges only as the contingent fold of a two-dimensional code into three-dimensional
proteins. Protein folding thus occupies the limit position of contemporary life science,
a node in an informatic network that is entangled with contingency. It is possible
that this fold is in fact composed of contingency.13
(19.0)
What shape is the small bowel? A tangle, it somehow is lifted by a pair of human
hands into the opened pocket of flesh. Stitched and eventually grafted to the anus, it

W e t w a r e s
allows the recipient to eat for the first time in years.14 Nonetheless, this is no cut
and paste operation—the future is nothing if not at stake. The recipient’s body,
dosed on Cyclosporine, could reject the alien flesh and its bacterial inhabitants. The
transplanted bowel is thus stitched to the surface of the skin, rendering its acceptance
or rejection visible to the eye of a health care provider at someone’s HMO.
(20.0)
Both Burroughs’s understanding of language and the molecular biological conception
of organisms sprout in the substrate of “information.” Here bodies and statements
both become occasions for the exercise of coding and decoding technologies and
disciplines. Crime, for example, becomes tied to statements not so much of truth
about the past than about the availability of codes in the present. A trace of DNA
becomes a speech act, a highly regulated testimony to an absent but promising pres-
ence: a criminal body. A wire is worn, a body becomes a transducer for testimony, a
sex act becomes a wired word. Such an informatic economy does not represent bodies
so much as it orders them, organizing them in space and time. “You were there.”
The impact of a body resides in its capacity to alter configurations of information:
Lights. DNA. Action.
(21.0)
One of the most popular explanations for cattle mutilations was alien organ harvest-
ing. In September 1979, “reports of strange bloodless animal mutilations began to
appear in the United States, Australia, and Canadian newspapers—accounts of a
steer’s ear, eye or tongue taken, its genital and rectal tissue excised with cookie-cutter-
clean precision, its jaw stripped of flesh.”15
(22.0)
“The smallest interval is always diabolical.”
(23.0)
The recipient’s body is prepared at about the same time as the donor’s. What is the
recipe for the preparation? Once upon a time, there may have been a discussion
among family members about funeral preparation. Maybe nothing at all was said.
Maybe a driver’s license names the deceased as a donor. Perhaps an organ procure-
ment organization is contacted when brain death is declared. The family is ap-
proached by an organ procurement professional or a health care provider. A decision
is made. Harvesting begins just in time, as soon after the declaration of brain death

as possible. The question of donation is “decoupled” from the declaration of brain
death, so there is an interval of shock and grief.
(24.0)
This informatic distribution of selves indexes a shift not merely in the self’s location
but in its possible topologies as well. Being beside oneself entails a set of practices
that fold and knot the forms of subjectivity that sprout in contemporary ecologies of
capital and media. “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV” becomes the mantra for
a self that seeks to articulate its various simulacra with a geography and an ontology—
on TV, not on TV—capable of locating or finding subjectivity. This is your brain.
This is your brain on drugs.
(25.0)
This knitting together of various selves of different locales and moments is the very
function of contemporary subjectivity, the one still hilariously and hysterically capable
of saying “I,” of promising to promise, of writing and signing a living will or donating
organs. Here it is: “Turn off my life support. No heroic measures.” These proxy
selves carry out and even endure the work of telling the story of contemporary sub-
jectivity distribution.
(26.0)
I am waiting for the money shot. The image of a stroked layer flesh of the abdominal
wall is itself interrupted by an edit: A man walks slowly across an airport tarmac with a
blue igloo cooler. “Imagine not being able to eat. Ever.” The money shot. The image
of the need. According to an anthropologist I know, some vegetarians feel odd about
receiving donor organs. All the more odd that they should carry these “gifts of life”
in a lunch box. Some also feel a cannibalist repulsion to the incorporation of the
flesh of the other organ procurement agencies nonprofit organizations, bills work-
ing hard to keep in touch with my slack self feel a cannibalist repulsion to another. . .

T E N

Reference Abducted; or, Saucerian Section
on any ordinary day—to the extent that there are such things—I see an awful lot
of aliens. Most of them are Grays, with olivine eyes that take up most of their egg-
shaped faces. Come to think of it, most of them are nothing but face, eyes adorning
backpacks, skateboards, bumper stickers, tattoos. And none of them move. Not even
a little. They are, strictly speaking, liquid, conforming to the space of their containers,
miming the rhythm of their vehicles. When I am not looking, they seem to replicate.
I mean, how else did so many of them suddenly appear? There are even several of
them on my computer as I write this. “Perhaps he is collaborating in the writing of
this right now.”1
Unless you have been in a coma since 1947 (and perhaps even if
you have), you have seen them too. Don’t pretend. I know, it’s a bit embarrassing. I
can’t remember the first time I saw one, if there was a first time. It’s as if they have
always been there, and I simply have no memory of them. Do they, like any fit object
of a paranoid narrative, remove evidence of their past existence, wipe our memories
clean even as we gaze upon them? Why can’t I remember the first time I saw an
alien?
Or maybe, in some sense, they were unrepresentable. Maybe it is
only now that these uncanny guests are literally able to appear, to become stickers,
Sympathy for the Alien:
Informatic Ecologies and
the Proliferation of Abduction

film images, patches, T-shirts. Perhaps, even, there is something about the present
that forces them to appear, to flush them out of the sky and onto the icon. Do we
have any witnesses to this event, this becoming icon of the alien, the alien’s abduction
by the image? What would prevent a witnessing of such a becoming?
We are called on to produce more than one witness, and in this
segment we will be listening to multiple testimonies to this entrance of the alien into
our networks of representation. For before it becomes iterable enough to appear, lit-
erally, anywhere, the citational image of the alien was networked with a series of sin-
gular bodies, bodies that were probed, abducted, instructed, forced to speak. Some
of these bodies lived in and off the discourse we call, out of habit, science fiction.
Others found themselves on a couch, hypnotized, or speaking out of the pages of a
popular book. But all, as witnesses, testify to the sampled quality of abduction.2
By sampling, of course, I am referencing the heterogeneous
chains of sound and/or image that have composed hip-hop and new music perfor-
mance for nearly a quarter century. Sampling—the grafting of one sequence of sound
or image onto another—relies in its conceptualization and its practice on an under-
standing of sound and image as information, information whose major effect is found
its ability to be networked, connected up to new contexts and moments. By this I do
not mean that music, video, or text that samples seeks to “inform” in the CNN
sense of the term, although that may also be true. Rather, the emergence of the
practice of sampling is associated with the capacity to manipulate sound and images
as sequences, a citationality amplified by their digital medium. So, for example,
when DJ Spooky operates through the syntheses of disjunctive sound—a track from
a stereo album used to test high-fidelity equipment that enunciates the words “stereo-
phonic sound” is blended and refrained through percussion, horns, jet engines, and
various styles of noise—he treats the entire audio universe as an immense informatic
palette.
“The Subliminal Kid” moved in and took over bars, cafes and juke boxes of
the world cities and installed radio transmitters and microphones in each bar
so that the music and talk of any bar could be heard in all his bars and he had
tape recorders in each bar that played and recorded at arbitrary intervals and
his agents moved back and forth with portable tape recorders and brought
back street sound and talk and music and poured it into his recorder array. . .3
As the liner copy suggests, the emergence of sampling as a technique is conjoined
with the continual possibility of being sampled. Not merely a manipulative technique
of an informatic medium, it describes an ontological condition—the continual and

structural possibility of sampling, of one chunk of information being copied and net-
worked with another site, “street sound and talk and music . . . poured . . . into his
recorder array.” Indeed, this ontological exposure is registered primarily in the capac-
ities for transformation complicit with being-sampled. New surface areas of embodi-
ment and deterritorialization are constantly exfoliating as technologies of informatic
sampling blur the very landscape of “human” consciousness, rendering practices of
autonomy, privacy, and propriety into entropic, conceptual formations good only at
propagating themselves. Contemporary privacy technologies such as PGP cryptog-
raphy and voice encryption seek to reduce the possibility of such media citations—
such as a tape recording of a telephone conversation concerning, say, Newt Gingrich
and its subsequent high-velocity propagation through the media. Here information
economies enable little more than the acceleration and amplification of that most
ancient of media: the rumor.
And yet the thought of the informational universe is hardly con-
fined in its effects to our usual understandings of “media” or, certainly, representa-
tion. They are also an aspect of a larger panic—an encounter with the exobiological
character of an informational universe, what funkster George Clinton (the most
sampled man on the planet) has dubbed in another context the Mothership Connec-
tion.4 In such an informatic universe, evolution functions less according to a logic of
incorporation than an operation of proliferation, a universal ecstasy that thrives on
the copy even more than it eats away at an interiority or organism.
For musical sampling is merely one example of the deterritorializ-
ing effects of informatics. Moving sounds from one site to another, the high-resolution
tweaking of an image sample made possible by morphing technologies differentially
repeats transformations in practices of the life sciences. With the emergence of a
digital molecular biology organized around the manipulation of traits or alleles as
information, the “organism” or even “life” no longer serves as a delimitable object of
biological inquiry. Instead—as with DJ Spooky’s audio universe—molecular biology
operates on an immense recombinant informatic interface. The new citationality of
molecular biology enables novel styles of connection and exposure to other traits,
other species and other machines. The contours of the human body are being virtually
reorganized as the alleged essence of the body, DNA, becomes mobile, a moveable
and thus re-moveable script of oneself that is constantly available to an alleged “out-
side” that we cannot master.
Pitches are given to venture capitalists, IPOs are floated, living
systems begin to coevolve with the stock market. As a result, unprecedented life-forms
arrive. It is of course crucial that such life-forms arrive first as nearly transparent

commodities available for universal exchange, dissipative structures literally becoming
machines for the production of selective wealth. Beyond “speaking” as commodities
or transforming our ecology into an allegedly dead zone of things, such novel life-
forms occasion new forms of deterritorialization that are quite literally ecstatic, an
allopoiesis that overtakes the self-propagation of autopoietic systems. We are, as evo-
lutionary psychologist Merlin Donald might put it, out of our heads, increasingly dis-
tributed beings whose cognitive and evolutionary insides are becoming outsourced
across a network. Donald wrote of the effect that the allegedly external storage device
writing had on the emergence of thought and interiority but he only hints at the
forms of consciousness cultivated by a much more amplified and differential infoscape
composed by this most recent encounter between capital and evolution.5
From Citings to Sightings: Close Encounters of the Informatic Kind
Abduction discourse exemplifies the character of such an informatic landscape in
which new practices of citationality—such as the sampling of DNA—emerge. From
its very origin, the “problem” of extraterrestrials has been conceptualized as a prob-
lem of information. An early (1953) report from the Robertson panel, charged with
an evaluation of the UFO problem, concluded that the threat of the Unidentified
Flying Object is of an informatic kind:
Parlous times . . . result in a threat to the orderly function of the protective
organs of the Body Politic. We cite as examples the clogging of channels of
communication by irrelevant reports, the danger of being led by continued
false alarms to ignore real indications of hostile action, and the cultivation of
a morbid national psychology in which skillful hostile propaganda could in-
duce hysterical behavior and harmful distrust of duly constituted authority.6
That is, it was the replication and propagation of the rumors
and reports of UFO sightings and contact that disturbed the panel, and not the ob-
jects of the reports and rumors themselves. Excessive discussion of UFOs could, in
and of itself, constitute a very real danger, endangering the organs of the body
politic, clogging them like a rhetorical virus. The very contact of Americans with
these stories risked the cultivation of a psyche that would be even more exposed and
susceptible to a hysterical rejection of authority, a psyche perhaps less conducive to a
National Security virus that was so effectively propagating. In short, UFO reports,
from the perspective of the U.S. government, were a rhetorical contagion threaten-
ing the effective production of narratives about itself, a “duly constituted authority.”
Such distrust—the belief that their own government’s authority was to be distrusted,

with the secret truth veiled from the public—apparently provokes belief in, rather
than skepticism of propaganda. The Robertson panel clearly found propaganda to be
more contagious, and more “out there,” than truth.
Thus the early management of the UFO phenomenon in the
United States focused at least as much on the establishment of reporting protocols
as on the investigation of sighting events. Allen Hynek, a respected astronomer who
worked with several of the early investigations into UFO phenomena, recognized
that the ecology of the UFO included its status as a rhetorical practice: “UFOs exist,
for most of us, as reports.”7 From very early on, the task of the meager U.S. UFO
investigation efforts was to separate the UFO “signal” from its “noise,” a task which
Hynek would later charge was essentially the denial of the possibility of signal.8 In-
deed, the very code names of early investigative committees—Project Sign mysteri-
ously became Project Grudge—suggested a semio-textual understanding of the alien.
Faced with the possibility of a body politic clogged with a surplus of information, in-
vestigative teams sought to put the country on a rhetorical diet.
Yet it was the very informatic economy associated with UFOs—
a blip on a radar screen, a government report, a “message for mankind”—that would
thwart such an effort. For any desire to stifle the news of the UFO will itself make
news—witness the recent proliferation of Roswell theories in the face of the U.S.
Government’s attempt to “come clean.” Traditional understandings of the UFO and
abduction phenomena have understood the alien presence as a crowd phenomenon,
one in which the mass of reports essentially acts as an aggregate, a totality in which
one report spawns another which spawns another, proliferating into a mob not unlike
the ones that overtook certain sections of New Jersey after Orson Welles’s War of the
Worlds hoax. In this understanding of the appearance of the alien, the observer or re-
porter is primarily interested in determining what the alien is; hence the reports
which threaten to clog the organs of the body politic, the univocal messages that
they and the aliens bear. In this context, to manage the proliferation of UFO infor-
mation, one must simply cut it off; in the place of a mass or crowd of sightings and
reports, we will have an aggregate of silence. Such a diagnosis, troubled as it is by a
“clogging,” is consistent with a rhetorical economy of incorporation that characterized
the surplus of alien reports to be fundamentally objects of containment.
But perhaps such an understanding forgets the very essence of
the alien presence, its characteristic ability to proliferate and mutate, disturbing the
various taxonomical categories that we bring to bear on “them.” As one psychologist
and UFO investigator with a particularly teleological bent put it, perhaps we “are
meant to be baffled.” While I would challenge the teleological and anthropomorphic

attachment of meaning to the UFO phenomonon, it is difficult to argue with the
claim that “aliens” and “UFOs” appear to be inherently cryptic; no hermeneutic of
disclosure has proved capable of providing sufficient revelation for the growing
population of observers, abductees, and debunkers. The discourse mushrooms—
with bestsellers, magazines, Usenet news groups, television dramas, and blockbuster
films—even as the indeterminacy of the alien phenomenon persists. Many groups
claim to know what these phenomena are, but none are sufficiently persuasive to
have the final word, so there will still be yet another rerun of the X-Files, yet another
confession of abduction, yet another debunking.
I will suggest here—and it is my hope that you are suggestible—
that in this cryptic context, alien phenomena are better understood as proliferating
packs than incorporating crowds, drawing these concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s
sampling of Elias Canetti’s enormous and marvelous book Crowds and Power.9 For
Deleuze and Guattari’s Canneti, the (closed) crowd is a mass or aggregate that
achieves one voice; its borders are secure enough that one most definitely knows
who is “in” the crowd and who is “out” of it. Paranoia—that usual suspect trotted
out to explain cold war UFO flaps—is the all-incorporating subject formation asso-
ciated with the crowd—it is sure that all of these “events” add up to something, even
if this something is, in the eyes of the national security agencies charged with the
management of the UFO problem, nothing itself. By contrast, pack phenomena are
characterized by their continual variation—as with a pair of dice, variation is built
into the operation. In a pack, this continual variation—its proliferation, its transience,
its subsequently shifting morphology—renders the borders of the phenomenon per-
sistently uncertain. Rather than incorporating everything on its itinerary with the
repetitious mantra of “inside/outside, inside/outside,” alien phenomena replicate in
exuberance, nomadically distributing themselves across diverse and even divergent
ecologies.
It is this continual “surprise” value associated with the pack that
seems to best map alien events. For as entities that are understood as information—
Hynek even calculated what he called the “strangeness rating” of each report, a rat-
ing roughly commensurate with Claude Shannon’s quantitative description of infor-
mation—alien phenomena continually surprise observers.10 One abductee, sampling
perhaps from the conventions of Penthouse Forum, put it this way: “I never thought it
would happen to me . . .” In this framework, alien events would be understood as
cryptic—indeed, as “alien”—not because we “lack” some bit of information but be-
cause, as pack phenomena, alien events are characterized by their status as multi-
plicities more closely associated with swarm behavior than with the understanding

of any individual subject. As with the slightest twitch of a starling’s wing, the multi-
plicities called “aliens” propagate the smallest difference into extraordinary events.
Aliens, like a cloud of starlings, arrive.
Alien arrivals, so I would argue, must be understood within the
economy of the sample because they are (1) constituted by a citationality that allows
them to be iterated within the context of a global hyperspace (I’ve seen this on TV!)
and a corporeality composed of information (They’re taking samples of my DNA
and selling them to biotech companies!) and (2) because their consistency across all
previously instantiated reporting protocols resides only in their variation, like a refrain
composed of heterogeneous chunks of sound, an orderly noise continually altered by
each successive sample. The crafting of samples demands, above all else, variation, a
discontinuity physicist and digital cosmologist Edward Fredkin describes as the
“grainy” or discrete quality of an informatic universe such as our own. Fredkin para-
doxically describes such a flickering universe where every (literal) bit of space/time is
binary, one or zero, on or off, as finite. Crucial to such a universe is that every bit of
space/time is “about” to be something else: the future. “Every part of space is com-
puting its future as fast possible, while information pours in from every direction.
The result is the same as caused by the apparent randomness of quantum mechanical
processes.”11
This nearly structural fluctuation and uncertainty, of course, gen-
erates more and more information associated with alien phenomena, information
that seeks to put one final piece in the puzzle and achieve revelation. Many contem-
porary abduction accounts—the localization of the blurry tangle of an Unidentified
Flying Object and a human subject—narrate and invent the body that would bear
such a pack-like excess. Former Van Halen lead singer Sammy Hagar, contacted in
1968 within a dream by an alien presence, told the story this way:
I woke up and caught the whole thing going down. Either there was informa-
tion being programmed into me, or information was being taken out of me
to see where my head was at.12
This uncertainty regarding the very borders of one’s body—not to mention of a
dream—is symptomatic of the informatic ecology of the sample. An ecology of con-
tinual exposure, the deterritorializing effects of such information transfer erode the
very agency of the subject—as sampler or samplee, Hagar’s confession emerges out
of the space of their convergence, the one who can only say either/or.
But perhaps contemporary subjectivity—I’m abducted, therefore
I am—is cultivated less out of any certainty concerning one’s own agency or the

boundaries of one’s body, and more out of the continual becoming that the exteriority
of information makes available. Perhaps, in the context of an informatic ecology, we
need not mourn the panic that emerges from a crashed disk. Such crashes effectively
introduce a fluctuation, or what Deleuze and Guattari have characterized as rhythm,
into the linear space of binary, serial computation, providing countermeasures to
what William S. Burroughs has diagnosed as that other alien virus: language, or, at
least, language captured or even abducted by the idiom of the either/or, the Word.13
In what follows I will pursue several moments or samples of ab-
duction, samples which will attempt to graft abduction onto an encounter with the
capacities of informatic bodies, the bodies we find ourselves living with. Perhaps
these bodies—whose boundaries, I have tried to argue, are multiple, massively par-
allel, at once inside and outside—emerge in association with alien events for good
reason: aliens are themselves multiplicities, they come in packs and not individuals.
To sample the excessively prolific science fiction author Isaac Asimov, “There is no
such thing as a single UFO sighting.”
Confession of an Artificial Hoax;
or, The Sokal Construction of Abduction
What do you expect? I am working on one of my innumerable schemes, trying to
write up a screenplay that would let me keep one tentacle out of the academy, maybe
make some money. The treatment is as follows: It seems that a famous abduction
author has disappeared. Now this guy is notoriously fond of publicity—he’s been
known to actually chase the paparazzi, claim that some celeb has been abducted—so
nobody knows quite what to do. The police can’t quite take it seriously, I mean the
guy’s likely to show up any day now, appear out of nowhere in Oprah Winfrey’s living
room or something. But the days go by, his family is starting to pull their political
strings, and a good cop is caught in the middle. He gets pulled off of his current as-
signment, in which he helps locate missing children, and starts searching for “The
Abducted” (my working title) by going undercover into the abduction community,
pretending he is an English professor interested in UFO discourse . . .
Anyhow, that’s as far as I get. It’s competing with a performance
art piece in which I would carry out drive-by shootings of Tamagotchi, you know,
those artificial life pets. I want to make a court rule on digital pet slaughter. I could
write a book about it, get on Geraldo, maybe even Lingua Franca. Oh yeah—they
are defunct now. Anyhow, I get sleepy—you know the feeling—so I think I’ll close
my eyes, just for second, you know, rest my eyes from the screen, nothing major.

Next thing I know, its one of those hypnagogic surf expeditions.
I’m asleep, I know I’m asleep, and yet my body feels like it’s on a mission of its own,
trying to tell me to wake up. My body’s a field of electrical forces, a body online, and
unfortunately my vocal cords seem to have hung up on me. I usually try to yell myself
into wakefulness in these situations, but no dice. My mouth opens and closes, but
nothing but a wheezy breath results.
All of a sudden—and this is the weird part—I’m thinking about,
of all things, Alan Sokal. Now I couldn’t care less about the whole science “wars”
thing—I mean, I know the academy needs its fair share of the scandal space in
the mediascape, but these days thought alone would seem to be enough of a scandal.
Do we really need border wars? How mid-twentieth century, this concept of the
border. . .
Anyhow, I am overwhelmed by this incessant, monotonous
thought: “Alan Sokal. Alan Sokal. Alan Sokal.” So I’m thinking, yes, I should have
thanked him. I should have thanked him for citing me in his Social Text article.
Those of us in the pre-tenure orbit need all the citations we can get, so I should
have thanked him.
“Alan Sokal. Alan Sokal. Alan Sokal.” Thank You Thank You
Thank You Thank You, I’m thinking. Thank You, already. But the rhythm is un-
interrupted. I have heard that dreams have porous borders, fractured enough that
other people find themselves sharing a dreamscape, like a toaster that picks up a
stray radio signal from a passing taxicab or a cop. New York is only about a four-hour
drive, which is very little at the speed of dream, which is no doubt electromagnetic.
But it gets worse. My humming electronic body suddenly decides
to become as moveable as the information that composes it. In the abduction litera-
ture, the verb is “to be floated.” It’s the common method of transport for bringing
those pesky human bodies into the proximity of the alien vehicle. So I’m floating out
through the windows that I was sitting beside, going, at the very least, somewhere
else. I wave at Amy, my sleeping partner in crime, wishing we had a camcorder.
I should have seen this coming. John Mack’s remarkable book, Ab-
duction, seems to have an unusual number of subjects drawn from rural Pennsylvania.14
I don’t know what is happening. It seems like all of a sudden I
am in a large, rather sterile room. Maybe I am in a faculty meeting! Then I see the
beings—I recognize them from television. I immediately think of how insulting it
was to call them beings. Hadn’t our own philosophical tradition been saddled enough
by the monotony of being? There are, I think, four of them, but every time I turn

my head I see something else, so who knows? There are, as the mathematicians like
to say, n of them. I ask “them” what they want to be called.
“Alan Sokal?” someone says with that questioning inflection such
as the one I will end this sentence with? “Oh no,” I’m saying, “no you’ve got the
wrong guy. I’m rhetoric boy. You want physics boy.” I’m gesturing, scratching my
head, pointing, giving them directions. “He’s in a different neighborhood altogether.
Head east on I-80, make a right at the Lincoln Tunnel, head for Washington Square.
I don’t have his number, but I’m sure if you contacted NYU, you . . .”
“Alan Sokal?” Okay, so now this one—I’ll call them, after Com-
munion author Whitley Strieber, visitors15—this one visitor is “sounding” kind of
desperate, giving me a look that I can only characterize as pleading. Is this some sort
of kinked alien fantasy where they want me to play at being Alan Sokal, some kind of
role-playing gig where they hijack organisms and force them to act like physicists
who act like postmodernists? No wonder they need to wander the galaxy, I’m think-
ing. These are some rare tastes . . .
“Alan Sokal!” This one is now gesturing, pointing with one of
four digits at a small table. I wonder if having only four digits encourages a species
to produce a more effective external memory device than writing. I mean, it would
do fine for helping to remember area codes, they’re only three numbers, but what
about phone numbers? Or doing your multiplication tables over five . . . ’Course there
are toes, I wonder how many toes . . .
Okay, now I’ve done it. A visitor is waving a book in my face. No
doubt my name is inscribed in it, all my minor, pathetic crimes are detailed there.
“I’m sorry!” I shriek. Then I notice the book. It’s in English. The light isn’t so great
in here so I’m squinting. It says: Social Text.
“Alan Sokal? Explain. Please.”
Okay. Now I get it, I think. They’re asking about Alan Sokal.
Like they were in the neighborhood, you know, and they want to discuss these fasci-
nating science wars. What, do I run the local Mediocre Books reading group or
something? I want to tell them to give it up, read something good like Kafka or Mel-
rose Place and get out of here, but they have come all this way. . . “Gather ’round . . .”
I say, like some scout leader beginning a ghost story. . .
“Alan Sokal is a celebrity. He got famous, for a while, claiming
to understand poststructuralism even though he didn’t. Perhaps more importantly,
he claimed to demonstrate that it didn’t matter if he understood poststructuralism or
not. He conducted an experiment in which he tested the effect of pretending to under-

stand some concepts to see if that pretense would be sufficient to materialize a text—
a manuscript—into a Social Text. It did. He passed the Turing Test of science studies—
somebody who was touring through science studies couldn’t tell if his manuscript
was real or not.”
No laughs for the pun. A tough crowd.
“Anyway, from this he concluded that the things he pretended to
believe in didn’t mean anything. If you ask me—which you have, sort of—what he
demonstrated was something much more interesting: the fact that pretending to
believe a concept has a material effect on that concept: It helps get it repeated.”
“You say it helps to get it repeated. Alan Sokal’s belief is very
powerful?”
“No, not particularly, although it did help that he was a physicist.
No, more important than Sokal’s particular belief was the fact that his pretense en-
abled his concepts to be repeated, iterated.”
“Alan Sokal?”
“I said that by pretending to believe in what he wrote, it got
written. How else, you might ask, could he have written it? It’s clear enough that
this was true of the transformation of the text into Social Text—they presume, in
some baseline way, that author’s “believe” what they write.”
“But Ross said . . .”
“I know, I know, it could have been a parody, but the principle is
the same, even if Sokal had never published it: Only that which can bear repetition is
writable. And to be repeated, it of course must have at least the pretense of exis-
tence—it must seem to have already been repeated once, if only to oneself.”
“Could you say that again?”
“No, I mean why bother? I am just citing an essay from somebody
that Sokal likes to make fun of. What Sokal demonstrated, quite brilliantly, was the es-
sentially iterative character of writing. Oh, he may have demonstrated that some mem-
bers of the science studies pack don’t know how to deal with the effects of simulacra
very well—which is pretty remarkable, considering how fascinated we are by them—
but above all Sokal demonstrated the essential fact about writing: its ability to be sam-
pled, to be cut out of one context and sewn into another. By writing an essay whose
primary function was to be misread, Sokal highlighted the continual capacity of texts
to mean something other, to become something else. This is not a cheap pluralism—
let a hundred interpretations bloom—but an empirical attribute of writing: ‘This force
of breaking is not an accidental predicate, but the very structure of the written.’”16

The visitors look at each other. There is much murmuring, some-
thing that sounds like laughter inside my head. It is not unpleasant. I am feeling a
little more comfortable—I’m the one with expertise here. It doesn’t seem like I am
in for any impromptu genetic research, so I draw on my training, turning the tables
with a rhetorical flourish . . .
“Just out of curiosity, why didn’t you ask Sokal about all this?”
“We weren’t sure if we could believe him.” More “laughter.” This
visitor had a point. Another one comes forward—oh, I recognize this one . . .
“Could you explain this ‘hoax’ a bit more? If Sokal thought that
these ‘concepts’ of ‘poststructuralism’ didn’t mean anything, why didn’t he write a
message that contained this information?”
“In some sense, he couldn’t have. As you know, the information
value of any message is essentially its surprise value.”
“Claude Shannon, yes?”
I somehow am not surprised that the visitors had gotten the mes-
sage on Claude Shannon. “Who would have been surprised if a physicist with a
Marxist past decided to critique science studies? Perhaps more crucially, a critique as
thorough and as effective as Sokal’s would have taken up hundreds of pages over a
period of years. And he probably would have had to work through one of the most
sluggish information transmission mechanisms known to the multiverse—something
called a ‘university press,’ a media outlet in which one is lucky—or unlucky, as the
case may be—to be read at all, let alone widely. By engineering an effective hoax,
Sokal pursued a very efficient strategy, informatically speaking: he compressed his
message to a smaller—if not the smallest—sequence of characters. This compression
also increased the velocity of the message. According to at least one of my sources,
news of a hoax actually beat the issue of Social Text to the stands. A hoax, in this con-
text, is therefore a rhetorical strategy that parasitically uses the pretense of ‘belief’ to
reduce the time and information necessary to propagate a message. ‘Belief’ is like a
compression algorithm, then.
“Crucially for Sokal’s strategy, though, his hoax was dependent
upon others. He could never be sure, in advance, that his message would be trans-
mitted, that his algorithm would run effectively. There was no way to cut to the
chase, as it were—he just had to send the message and endure the waiting; his message
needed to be actualized. Paradoxically, in order for his message to be completed, the
recipient must not understand it. Indeed, unlike our situation with the university press,
it is best if no one reads it at all. Hoaxes such as Sokal’s are not simply acts of deception,

although some hoaxes are—such as counterfeiting. Rather, hoaxes of the order of
Sokal’s operate through the difference between the initial reading of a message—even
if it be a nonreading—and a subsequent one, one that the hoaxer provides. We’ll
talk about that problem later.”
“Later? What is a problem later?”
Yes, I remember from Betty and Barney Hill’s 1961 abduction—a
breakthrough case—that some of the visitors have trouble with time.17 Well, we’ve
got that going for us, that ingenuous dicing up of time into homogenous, repetitive
chunks, one grafted onto another and another. . .
“Nothing. It’s now, I guess. What I mean is that the hoaxer some-
times has a hard time establishing credibility when they finally come out with what
they claim is the truth. Philip K. Dick—”
“Yes, yes, we know him,” they all chanted in unison, with much
laughter.
“Philip K. Dick drew this logic out to its remarkable conclusion
in a book called A Scanner Darkly.18 A man appears on a television show as a world-
famous imposter. He was a real scammer—he’d impersonated a doctor, performed
brain surgery, argued cases before the Supreme Court, impersonated a lion tamer—
he’d done it all. Of course it turned out that the guy hadn’t done any of this. He was
just a janitor from Disneyland, pretending to be a world-famous imposter, which, of
course, he now was . . .
“So imagine if Sokal had printed up some counterfeit money—
good hundreds—and passed them at a bank, planning to come in later and say:
‘Well, I hate to tell you, but I gave you some phony money earlier today. It doesn’t
seem that your detection system works so well. It doesn’t seem to me that this whole
monetary system has any merit; it can’t tell the difference between a real representa-
tion of value and a bogus one.’ I’m not sure he would have done so well with the
local prosecutor. And the prosecutor would have a point—why should we believe a
counterfeiter?
“But Sokal had a very minor version of this problem. Not much
money was at stake, I guess. There were apparently some parts of his essay that he
was ‘serious’ about, according to the short piece he wrote after the hoax was revealed.
So, for example, Sokal had some interesting things to say about the ways in which
mathematics is treated in our school curricula. So there were components of the essay
that somehow escaped the status of hoax. Some of it—besides his name of course,
although that too came under scrutiny—composed a message that was designed to

be understood, even if only on a third or nth reading. That is, one doesn’t—from
Sokal’s perspective—understand Sokal’s arguments concerning pedagogy the first
time around, because they are nested inside an enormous forest of citations. I can
barely keep track of who’s talking; it’s difficult to figure out when Sokal is speaking
and when he is citing somebody. This appears to be deliberate rhetorical tactic—
argue from authority, graft the text onto innumerable other ones. On the ‘second’
reading, of course, one doesn’t believe a word of it—it’s all syntax in the service of a
hoax, with the only semantics residing in its status as a fake. ‘What’s this garbage
about pedagogy?’ we say with a knowing smile. ‘I’m really surprised Ross wasn’t
tipped off by that bit. I mean really, he can’t be serious . . . ’
“Oh, but then we read his commentary on his own text, and we
learn that he was serious! So only now do we engage with the argument that Sokal
had constructed: math is being taught poorly and all this pomo crap is doing nothing
to help it. Not bad, actually, if a little off topic.”
Sage, concerned nodding from the visitors.
“But you have to think that now there is no a priori reason why
there might not be other ‘serious’ parts. At the same time, he might not be serious at
all about this pedagogy stuff. I mean if he’s so serious about it, why distract attention
from that part of the essay by making it true?”
“I like to pretend that his footnote to me is serious. I mean, after
all, it would seem that he was engaging in a canny, pomo bit of doubling in actually
citing me, since the first line of my cited essay is concerned with citationality itself:
“We have been inserted into a technoscientific text.”19 Yes, I feel a strange complicity
with Alan Sokal’s hoax. The primary rhetorical operation of his text is citation, the
cutting of text from one place and its insertion into another—the footnote. What
could it mean that he cites me writing about citationality? If he is not serious in citing
me, he sure chooses a funny way to show it: citing me is to refer to the importance
of the operation of citing, and in citing, executes the content of the essay. We’re
back to the world-famous imposter: Sokal pretends to cite me about citationality. It
turns out he was doing no such thing—just piling up my citation with the other
pomo nonsense. But in piling up my citation about citationalty, he cites me. Indeed,
my essay—on the third, posthoax reading—actually cites its own citation into the
essay. The fact that the essay is only referenced within a footnote and not in the
body of the text only amplifies the reference to citationality.”
“Citationality? This is our method of propulsion, no?”
The one with the copy of Social Text is speaking up again, shaking

the journal in my face. I knew it. The visitors had, unbelievably, learned something
from Sokal’s alleged hoax on quantum gravity. Against his wishes, Sokal had made
some sense. Maybe about wormholes.
“Oh.” I am on now, really on. “You mean that the traversal of a
wormhole relies, as Derrida would put it, on the essential disseminatory character of
the universe, its time out of joint? Yes, that’s it! For Derrida—the Heraclitus of dis-
course—one never speaks out of the same mouth twice. Indeed, the very concept of
the ‘same’ mouth forgets its multiplicity, its eternal variation, its différance, its differ-
ence from itself. Now I know why I went to graduate school! With wormholes, in-
formation and material gets inserted into one ‘mouth’ of the wormhole and emerges
from another ‘mouth’ at another time.” Here, I cite wormhole expert Kip Thorne:
A wormhole is a hypothetical shortcut for travel between distant points in
the universe. The wormhole has two entrances called “mouths,” one (for ex-
ample) near earth, and the other (for example) in orbit around Vega, 26
light-years away. The mouths are connected to each other by a tunnel through
hyperspace (the wormhole) that might be only a kilometer long. If we enter
the near-Earth mouth, we find ourselves in the tunnel. By traveling just one
kilometer down the tunnel as we reach the other mouth and emerge near
Vega, 26 light-years away as measured in the external universe.20
“From Derrida’s perspective—which as far as I know would be included in the exter-
nal universe—such an example of time travel is not one example among others: it al-
legorizes the essential dislocation at play in the emergence and operation of writing.
The attempt to articulate the becoming space of time, the becoming time of space
necessarily—and this would simply be the necessity of chance—has recourse to the
very medium of its enunciation—the primordial dis-location of the mouth, the voice’s
wandering away from itself, eternally varying such that one cannot rigorously deter-
mine the boundary of one mouth and another. Indeed, Saussure’s famous diagram of
the sign—two mouths connected by dotted lines to signify communication—could
provide us with another ‘mouth’ here. This is all the more perfect since Kip Thorne’s
work on wormholes itself emerged out of some consulting work he did in the writ-
ing of a novel by Carl Sagan—that is, Carl Sagan called up and asked Thorne if he
could work up a scheme that he could cite, and after a few thought experiments
Thorne provided Sagan with a method of transport for his novel, a scientific descrip-
tion of time travel through worm holes grafted onto science fiction.21 This is what
you meant, right?”

“No, negative, not our thought,” the visitor says, “although all
of that is very interesting.” They are inscribing this stuff on glowing, glyphic tablets.
The glyph looks like something like a fish.
“What I mean is that we, like your physicists, gleaned the con-
cept of the wormhole from science fiction, an Amazing Story from the 1920s that we
found in an archeological dig on our planet. This is science fiction, no?”
Close Encounters of the nth Kind
The universe, I realized, was being turned inside out—reversed. It was an eerie feeling, and
I felt terrible fear. Something was happening to me, and there was no one to tell it to.
Philip K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth
True, Philip K. Dick took a lot of drugs. That much we know. Author of more than
thirty-six novels—mostly science fiction but some that are sole members of a class
consisting of themselves, such as Valis—Dick was a skilled high-speed typist and a
brilliant, sardonic, and hilarious weaver of narrative. According to published accounts
of his own journals—an eight-thousand-page, unnumbered journal entitled “Exege-
sis”—he fell into somebody else’s novel: “I think I read all this in the novel THE
ROBE x years ago. Jeez, I’ve fallen into someone else’s novel!”22
Such a falling, of course, sounds familiar enough to viewers of
clay animation hero Gumby, who could “jump into any book with his pony pal Pokey
too,” but Dick’s experience was something other than a leap into the adventurous
world of textuality. Indeed, for Dick, the exposure to what he would later dub
“Valis”—the Vast, Active Living Intelligent System that spoke the “hideous words”
and sentences oozing from the radio—forced nothing less than an encounter with
the informatic character of the universe.
This encounter was itself multiple. Dick wrote at least four novels
that are implicated in what he would call “the events of 2-3-74,” a mysterious laser-
like pink light, a “firing of information” at his head that took place in February and
March of 1974, after his exposure to a glyph of a fish worn around the neck of a
pharmacist delivery woman at his apartment door. Each treatment of the event
swerved in its own peculiar fashion from a “representation” or “decoding” of the in-
formation that may or may not have been fired at Dick’s brain. The novels and the
Exegesis—itself formed out of pages that constitute non sequiturs of each other, as
there is no rigorous sequence to be had—form less an unraveling of Dick’s mysteri-
ous encounter than its repetition, a proliferation without origin. Valis, for example,

copies elements of the Exegesis’s treatment of 3 February 1974 into its narrative, a
narrative in which Horselover Fat’s story is told by a science fiction writer named
Phil. “Fat,” of course, is “Dick” in German, and Valis’s narrative operates less as the
“expression” of Dick’s story than of its grafting into a fictional universe that, in
some sense, differs from itself. So, for example, Phil tells us that Valis informed Fat
of his son Christopher’s health:
He knew, specifically, that his five year old son had an undiagnosed birth de-
fect and he knew what the birth defect consisted of, down to the anatomical
details. Down, in fact, to the medical specifics to relate to the doctor. . . His
brain had trapped all the information the beam of light had nailed him with,
but how could he account for it?23
This would of course suggest to the reader that this text describes
the event endured by Dick. Dick, too, we learn in the Exegesis, interviews, and other
novels of the Valis trilogy, knew the precise characteristics of a previously undiag-
nosed birth defect after the burst of information. It probably, Dick claimed, saved his
son’s life. This reading is encouraged by Dick’s citing of his own Exegesis—what
Phil the narrator characterizes as a “journal” but what Fat calls his “exegesis”—into
the text of Valis, a text that testifies to the informatic character of the universe:
One of the paragraphs in Fat’s journal impressed me enough to copy it out
and include it here. It does not deal with right inguinal hernias but is more
general in nature, expressing Fat’s growing opinion that the nature of the uni-
verse is information.24
In contrast to the precise information “transferred” into Fat/Dick’s brain, however,
the copy or citation of the Exegesis operates through its difference from itself. For
the Exegesis cited in the text of Valis is not the Exegesis at all—according Lawrence
Sutin, editor of those Exegesis selections published as In Pursuit of Valis, it appears
nowhere in the eight thousand pages written by Dick in his “apology for life.”
While the tractatus does recapitulate a number of prominent theories posed
in the real-life Exegesis, it is a separate work—polished distillations intended
to fit within the framework of the novel—and not a genuine selection of
quotations from the Exegesis itself.25
What is at stake here in the Exegesis’s citational difference from itself? While Sutin
immediately takes recourse to the notion of the “genuine”—itself a category contin-
ually and hilariously evacuated in Dick’s novels such as Man in the High Castle and

A Scanner Darkly26—it would seem that what is cited is not the Exegesis at all, but
the difference between the Exegesis and its citational graft, in other words the differ-
ence between the Exegesis and itself. What is cited, then, is the continually differing
character of exegesis, a differentiation that would thwart any final understanding of
the event, except an understanding of the event as itself a form of constant varia-
tion—Edward Fredkin’s “grainy,” discontinuous universe, where a change in kind is
always about to happen: the future. Fredkin’s second law of information reads “an
informational process transforms the digital representation of the state of a system
into its future state.” The fictional citation of the “Exegesis” articulates this as well
as can be expected:
Thoughts of the Brain are experienced by us as arrangements and re-
arrangements—change—in a physical universe, but in fact it is really infor-
mation and information processing that we substantialize.27
Change, differentiation, is articulated here as operations of information, operations
such as citing one text into another, a process of sampling which itself allows for the
articulation of an event’s difference from itself. Just as Dick deploys the alter ego
“Horselover Fat” marking the difference between author and autobiographical char-
acter—that is, a difference between Dick and himself—the sampling of a simu-
lacrum of the Exegesis dramatizes the variation that is the core of the exegetical
practice. If exegesis is that textual, interpretative practice devoted to disclosing the
truth of scripture, then Dick’s operation of exegetical citation discloses the truth of
February/March 1974’s continual variation. The only way for Dick/Fat to testify to
the pink light was to constantly change his story.
The Exegesis, then, is “grainy,” continually differing from itself
as it is made of variations and discontinuities. Such proliferation, though, paradoxi-
cally encourages a cosmology of epistemological finitude. True, such a digital, infor-
matic universe would seem to be a deterministic one—even Fredkin argues that
such a universe is finite to the extent that it is a “closed” system, leading him to pos-
tulate the possibility of simulating moments “before” the big bang, a logic of reversibil-
ity that disables any understanding of the universe as an incorporating “inflationary”
or “Pac-Man” cosmos whose inside continually engorges itself until collapsing in on
itself. But “the deterministic nature of finite digital processes is different in that it is
unknowable determinism.” Fredkin ties this to Turing’s entscheidung problem, which
hamstrings us concerning the binary prediction of any particular program’s instanti-
ation. To halt or not to halt? There is a “celebrated proof that, in general, there are
no analytical shortcuts that can tell the future state of some general computation any

quicker than doing the computation step by step.” That is, computation is epistemo-
logically finite; its ability to predict is limited by the speed of available computation.
As Fredkin puts it in a footnote, “In general, physics is computing the future as fast
as it can.”28
Hence rather than attempting to understand the meaning of his
informatic abduction, Dick’s rhetorical practice of exegesis was an ordeal of endur-
ance, a capacity to instantiate information. There is comedy and exhaustion in this
cosmic, albeit machinic, consciousness that requires continual interaction. What
was at stake for an identity in contact with Valis is survival and not knowledge, a sur-
vival that paradoxically induces a transformation.
Valis is the medium is the message. More crucial than the content
of the information fired is the suddenly affective encounter with the possibility of
living in a universe of immense and entangled complicity, where Fredkin’s universe
of information operates all the way down to twisted strands of DNA. Such a universe
is one of total exposure—the opening of a door leads to a burst of information, infor-
mation that itself emerges only from “elsewhere,” without origin. In Dick’s formula-
tion in the Exegesis, such information is not omnipresent but “multipresent,” always,
possibly, about to erupt, to appear around the next corner. “Could it be that in 3-74
Christ interfered with the genetic coding that had programmed me to die at that
time? . . . My gene-pool (DNA) memory fired—opened up: I know that.”29
This continual exposure is not, as in the familiar paranoid formu-
lation, peculiar to Dick in his cosmology; the encounter with Valis provoked Dick to
claim that the universe is itself a continually variable informatic field: “We appear to
be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computerlike thinking
system.”30 Dick, his characters and his readers, to the extent that these can be rigor-
ously distinguished from each other, dwell in an informational universe for whom
there is no cutting to the chase, no ethical or ontological principle capable of knowl-
edgeably preparing them for a fundamentally differential identity, future.
While this emphasis on the machinic, informatic character of
Dick’s universe may appear to be a symptom of a writing practice that included Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and a drug routine consisting of handfuls of amphet-
amines washed down with milkshakes, we have recourse to another archive that sug-
gests Dick’s understanding of the continual exposure fostered by the increasing
prevalence of ecologies of information was enmeshed with an equally material set of
events. In addition to being fascinated with the role of taping technologies in the
ouster of Richard Nixon—an event Dick claimed retroactively to have foretold in
his 1970 manuscript Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said—Dick was the object of a

mysterious informatic abduction in November of 1971. His Marin County home
was broken into, and his fireproof archive of files and work was ransacked and ex-
ploded. Local law enforcement was less than energetic in their investigation of the
crime, and over the years Dick continually speculated about the identities of the per-
petrators that stole and sampled his archive. Indeed, at one point his list of suspects
actually included himself. In a 1972 letter found amongst his Exegesis papers, Dick
writes:
I blew up my own house and forgot I did it. But why did I forget that I did
it? So I’d think that I had an actual enemy so I wouldn’t have to face the fact
that I’m paranoid, i.e. crazy. I blew up the house to convince myself that I
was sane. Anyone who would go to that much trouble must really be nuts . . . 31
The “truth” of Dick’s informatic abduction, though, is beside the point. Not because,
as some in the abduction community would have it, it is the experience of the abductee
or experiencer that is central to the abduction event. Instead, what Dick’s experiences
with Valis narrate brilliantly is that the encounter with an “alien” intelligence is not
about a message that is being given to earth or the experiencer. For the possibility of
parsing or consuming such an experience into a message depends upon the capacity
to rigorously compress the interpretation of the event. As Dick’s relentless encounter
with the shifting boundaries of his own experience indicates, such a compression is
not possible precisely because the experience of the alien is an encounter with the
exteriority of information—the fact that information, to paraphrase Socrates’s rap
on writing, is always possibly getting into the wrong hands, always possibly going
awry or being forgotten.32 Indeed, to tell the “truth” about exteriority is precisely
not to rigorously distinguish the true from the false, because real information wanders
into fiction and vice versa—hence Dick’s “forgetting” of his own detonation, his
“fall” into someone else’s novel. Or maybe his own: “I seem to be living in my own
novels more and more . . . My books are forgeries. Nobody wrote them.”33
Dick’s encounter with Valis, then, was less about the interpreta-
tion or ingestion of a message than the execution of an algorithm, an algorithm of
varying commands to differ, to sample or be sampled. In Dick’s phrasing, only an
entity that “would be itself and not itself continually” would be adequate to the expe-
rience of Valis: “I almost became a sincere tool of a conspiracy consisting of myself.”
Such continual variation would for Dick, in principle, extend not only to the self
that “bore” the event but also to the event itself, whose retrospective veracity could
never be separated from its profound difference from the present. Valis uttered im-

possible sentences whose very effects provoked the inability to differentiate between
the real and the unreal, thus recoiling on the status of Valis’s statements themselves.
In one of my novels . . . certain anomalies occur which prove to the characters
that their environment is not real. Those same anomalies are now happening
to me. By my own logic in the novel I must conclude that my (own) perhaps
even collective environment is only a pseudo-environment . . . as in the novel
I can’t figure it out. It makes no sense.34
Any narrative of Valis—a testimony to what Valis was—paradoxically entails a mem-
ory not of the past but of the present: “I claim to remember a different, very differ-
ent, present life.” This other present speaks to a second register on which the experi-
ence of abduction fosters something other than a message or understanding of a
truth—rather than a meaning that is decoded or interpreted, the experience of the
alien provokes transformative effects, becomings that Fredkin might dub the future:
I have been transformed, but not in any way I ever heard of. I drive differently,
much faster, reaching for an airvent on the dashboard that is not there. Evi-
dently I am used to another car entirely. And when I gave my phone number
the last two times I gave it wrong—another number. And to me the weirdest
thing of all: at night phone numbers swim up into my mind that I never
heard of before. I’m afraid to call them; I don’t know why. Perhaps in some
other part of Orange County someone else is giving my phone number as
his, drinking wine for the first time in his life and listening to Rock; I don’t
know. I can’t figure it out. If so, I have his money. . .35
In some sense, then, differentiation extends to more than the interpretation of the
Valis event—it extends to the transformation of Dick himself. For Dick, the universe
has ceased to be an outside that he somehow lives “in”—instead, the “memory coils”
called Philip K. Dick are in continual contact with the very surface of the universe,
information that continually transforms him. “I feel I have been a lot of different
people.” Philip K. Dick composes a Möbius body, a corporeality both “in” his novels
and just plain out of it, an interior subject called a “writer” who is nevertheless con-
tinually exposed to the strange hacks of Valis, who may or may not exist. Indeed, as
in the example of Sammy Hagar with which we began, Dick’s subjectivity and his
practice as a writer emerges precisely out of the impossibility of distinguishing an
inside from an outside.
Gilles Deleuze, in his 1968 book Coldness and Cruelty, argues that
Sade and Sacher-Masoch are among the great clinicians of medicine—they each
isolated the affects and orientations that cultivate their eponymous syndromes.
Sacher-Masoch, for example, excelled in the differentiation of masochism from an
alleged “love of pain,” focusing instead on the masochist’s penchant for waiting and
anticipation. In short, Sacher-Masoch shows the masochist to be cultivating a capac-
ity for the future, a future of “a new man” who has removed the image of the father
and made possible a Nietzschean overcoming of the human.
Although Deleuze’s claim concerning Sacher-Masoch’s singularity
is open to question, I would nonetheless like to apply his understanding of the clinical
contribution of literature to Dick’s treatment of abduction. For while the psycho-
logical, historical, and bestselling authors of abduction discourse tend to emphasize
or at least engage the “truth” of abduction scenarios, Dick isolates what is perhaps
most singular in abduction narratives: their capacity to proliferate and induce trans-
formation in diverse ecologies, to instill what Deleuze and Guattari have character-
ized as “becomings.” Rather than mimetic stagings or performances whose goal is
representation or completion, becomings are continuously variable events organized
around aspects or “particles” of an object or an event. “What is real is the becoming
itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that be-
comes passes.”36
Nor does becoming-wolf, for example, entail the ingestion by or
of the wolf: “All the better to eat you with,” says the alien. It is this characteristic of
being on the border, both inside and outside, a Möbius space, a space of impossible
consumption, that characterizes becomings. These continual transformations operate
not only at the level of a subject—“I feel myself becoming a wolf”—but of multiple
subjects—a couple of authors, a pack, a polis. In constant motion, the pack, the
alien, is always somewhere in particular, but it has n centers. You can locate the center
or “leader” of a distributed pack when you find that which never ceases to differenti-
ate—that which differs from itself, which will, of course, always be elsewhere, later.
It is this encounter with the informatic and therefore variable
uni-verse that marks Dick’s relation to “Valis,” an engagement whose defining char-
acteristic is its continual difference: Valis always has the status of n, unknown. Indeed,
knowledge, in the usual sense—what was it?—is hardly material in Dick’s relation to
Valis. Rather than knowing what Valis “means” or what it “was,” Dick engaged the
incessantly experimental and profoundly ethical question: What should I do?
Astronomer Allen Hynek coined the by now familiar taxonomy
of the alien: close encounters of the first, second, and third kinds.37 Since his death,
a fourth category has been added: the encounter of the fourth kind, abduction. Dick’s
experiences merit yet another strata of the encounter with the alien, one that perhaps
disrupts taxonomy altogether, as it engages with an encounter of the n th kind: the
encounter with alien thought, the thought of an alien as itself a consequence of the in-
formatic character of the universe. Perhaps, even, Dick’s encounter with Valis teaches
us that, in the alien encounter, one precisely comes into contact with thought, not a
narcissistic discovery of ourselves in the cosmos, or even an understanding of the
finitude of our knowledges, but the incessant, asignifying exteriority of thinking, the
sampling and being-sampled that thought entails. To think, sampling Deleuze nar-
rating Foucault, is to fold, to double the outside with a coextensive inside. Thinking
is always in contact with an outside, a distant other who is bent into subjection, but
not without haunting interiority with its proximity to a monstrous alterity. To arrest
the arrival of the alien with the question of ontology—“Ok, What is it?”—or epis-
temology—“Prove it!”—is to enter into the game of lack, an infinite game in which
neither the negative case—“The alien does not exist”—nor the positive—“Finally,
conclusive proof that Christopher Walken is from Proxima System! Film at eleven”—
takes us anywhere.
But the emphasis on the epistemological and ontological charac-
ter of the abduction event does more than mire conversation in a stagnant differend,
an agon that fails at resolution in an analysis of very real becomings. It also over-
looks the very possibility of any event whatsoever, the cultivation of exteriority
that is, among other practices, reading. Psychologist John Mack characterizes the
effects of abductee testimony in terms of development and evolution, but stripped
of its teleology. We might also link such speech acts to “involution” and “deterrito-
rialization,” operations of folding and the emergence of heretofore “alien” con-
nectivities:
Stated differently, the information gained in the sessions is not simply a re-
membered “item,” lifted out of the experiencer’s consciousness like a stone
from a kidney. It may represent a developed or evolved perception, enriched
by the connection that the experiencer and the investigator have made.38
For it is in a matrix of hospitality, an exposure to an other, Fredkin’s unavoidable,
finite, “running” of abduction events—the encounter of an nth kind, the informatic
permeability of thought—that abduction itself gets abducted, taken for a ride, carried
away. Getting into the wrong hands, abduction becomes something other than its
genealogy would suggest, a technology of identity that emerges out of an encounter
with the unthinkable, a shattering of thought that disables the reproduction of any
interiorized identity. Taken by surprise, abduction enters the house of being and
squats, deterritorializing the household with its unheimlich effects.

Ironically, abduction discourse tends to overlook the very vehicles
of abduction, the materiality and subsequent rhetoricity of the Web sites, books, films,
government documents, hypnosis sessions, and case studies concerning abduction.
On one hand, this overlooking of the work that the reading and viewing of abduction
carries out for the alleged consumers of abduction narratives is far from containing
any surprise for us: the very overlooking of corporeality fostered by the rhetorical
ecology of the informatic body forms a discursive fractal with the elision of abduc-
tion discourse’s strange rhetoricity: its mode of delivery, its complex of affects, its
delays and amnesias. The abduction event is itself, like its discursive cousin DNA,
conflated with its writing, swallowed by the Word.
On another tentacle, however, this forgetting bundled with the
informatic body, this interrupting of the flesh, marks precisely the dislocation and
variation at the heart of these informatic bodies. Informatic bodies are composed of,
precisely, surprise. The becoming-information of the body, rather than miming an
alleged disembodiment of informatics from the “flesh-eating 90s,” provokes a double
take, and all the problematics of doubling, on the topologies of human subjectivity.
Amnesia, for example, opens human experience to the charge that it can’t remember
itself, that it is forgetting itself in its becoming-inhuman. This forgetting becomes,
then, a responsibility, a demand for testimony to the past. It also becomes a new ca-
pacity, a response-ability, the capacity to welcome an other who has surprised us.