2-3: code and matter
Although N. Katherine Hayles notes that there have been complex feedback loops of influence between the life sciences and technology throughout Western history,[5] she also claims that the tendency to posit continual overlaps between biology and information technologies have taken on particularly totalizing dimensions since World War II. In many ways, the roots of this convergence can be traced to Norbert Weiner's pioneering work Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which posited the seemingly counter-intuitive thesis that everything from animals to humans to computers could be conceptualized as "information organisms." Drawing on Warren McCulloch and Warren Pitts model of the neuron that was "capable of formulating any proposition that could be proved by a universal Turing machine,"[6] Hayles contends that it was in Weiner's recognition that the mind of any organism (human or animal) was capable of performing computational acts that there was a "strong justification for considering both machines and biological organisms as cybernetic entities." In effect, by conceptualizing all organic and in-organic, vital entities solely in terms of "message probabilities" and information feedback (transmission, reception, and processing), Hayles contends that Weiner's cybernetics decontextualize information from the differing contexts of the material body, allowing it to flow "between different substrates and different kinds of embodiment."[7]
And yet, despite (or perhaps because of) the inherently Cartesian and universalizing basis behind Weiner's thesis, cybernetics provided a key source of inspiration to many aspects of the field of molecular biology "which underwent many key developments around the same time. For instance, biologists Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod's idea of "genetic regulatory mechanisms" in the cell was a direct appropriation of Weiner's notion of the feedback loop and informational message.[8] Similarly, Weiner's focus on the quantitative (rather than semantic) aspects of information as divorced from context helped to formalize theories from biochemists like Erwin Chargaff, George Gamow, and Alexander Rich.[9] However, as Alexander Galloway notes, no appropriation has seen such widespread consequences as James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin's research on the structure of DNA, published in 1953.[10] For it is in the description of DNA as a "genetic code," that Foucault's biopolitical concept of "life itself" is explicitly underlined in terms of biology (and body) as information.
![[5]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-5.jpg){kind=link}
![[6]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-6.jpg){kind=link}
![[7]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-7.jpg){kind=link}
And yet, despite (or perhaps because of) the inherently Cartesian and universalizing basis behind Weiner's thesis, cybernetics provided a key source of inspiration to many aspects of the field of molecular biology "which underwent many key developments around the same time. For instance, biologists Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod's idea of "genetic regulatory mechanisms" in the cell was a direct appropriation of Weiner's notion of the feedback loop and informational message.[8] Similarly, Weiner's focus on the quantitative (rather than semantic) aspects of information as divorced from context helped to formalize theories from biochemists like Erwin Chargaff, George Gamow, and Alexander Rich.[9] However, as Alexander Galloway notes, no appropriation has seen such widespread consequences as James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin's research on the structure of DNA, published in 1953.[10] For it is in the description of DNA as a "genetic code," that Foucault's biopolitical concept of "life itself" is explicitly underlined in terms of biology (and body) as information.
![[8]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-8.jpg){kind=link}
![[9]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-9.jpg){kind=link}
![[10]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-10.jpg){kind=link}
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