Sarah Kember (2003) Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life, London: Routledge.


If Donna Haraway's Manifesto for Cyborgs (1990) was predicated on cold war inspired developments in artificial intelligence (first written in 1985), Sarah Kember's book Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (2003) attempts to update these ideas to post-cold war developments in artificial life (2003). In the discourse of artificial life, the fundamental issues of autonomy (the self organisation of agents in a system) and artificiality (the evolving condition of agents and environments) are evidently constituted in shared and distributed networks. Kember is keen to acknowledge some of the scientific claims in this area of within the cultural narrative of the time. For instance, Richard Dawkins's Darwinist The Selfish Gene (1976), can be read against the intellectual discussions around subjectivity during the 1970s under the influence of post-structuralist thinking. Hence the cultural narrative can be seen to be 'about displaced agency, about a subjectivity that has the illusion of control while the real locus of control lies with another agent who inhabits the subject and uses him for its own ends' (Kember quoting N. Katherine Hayles, 2003: 18). This tendency in a-life, like cybernetics before it, explains the human as an animal that is like a machine, and is thoroughly ideological and deterministic. The human is seen as an autonomous machine that can construct, maintain and reproduce itself in more or less selfish ways. 

The issue of biology as ideology is further emphasised in the detail that Darwin was influenced by the economic theory of Thomas Malthus researching populations' growth and the more efficient management of scarce resources. Kember argues that the Darwinian worldview is developed in parallel to the economic paradigm in which the autonomous human subject is in general seen to shape society rather than the other way around (the post-structuralist view) - the cause rather than effect of society (2003: 20, citing the geneticist Richard Lewontin). Clearly the cause and effect thesis of much scientific thinking in this area is a limited one, reductive and over-reliant on the universal laws and logic (especially from physics and chemistry). This is expressed profoundly in the cybernetic desire to equate humans with machines. Kember quotes the biochemist Steven Rose in this respect, in describing:
'modern science as the inheritor of nineteenth-century mechanical materialism, itself tightly linked ideologically to a particular phase of the development of industrial capitalism' (2003: 21).

'Techno-revolutions' are favourably publicised if the interests of individuals and capital overlap. Critical Art Ensemble would go as far as to suggest that this is rebirth of eugenics driven by the market to both make more profit and make better workers: 'the values/needs of capital are now being inscribed on the body at a molecular level' (2002: 59-60).

Biology, like technology, is thus clearly caught up in complex cultural narratives of power, knowledge and subjectivity despite its claims otherwise. For instance, Lewontin sees the human genome project as another way in which knowledge and power serve the interests of institutions over individuals (Kember, 2000: 157). Although marketed as curing hereditary diseases, but the industry is really driven by the promise of huge profits of selling 'cures' to the wealthy. The fact that much research in this area is predictive is a cause for concern in the screening of workers for defects, promising: 
'a DNA-level quality control over the reproduction of labor power, control aimed not at the cure of disease but at the disgrading of potentially unproductive, oversensitive, or expensive units' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 106; especially in cuntries such as the USA where companies carry health insurance payments for employees). 
In Donna Haraway's terms the mapping of the human genone is another 'god-trick' of absolute and unquestionable knowledge. Biology inevitably constructs scientific fact and fiction. Thus Darwinian thinking has been used to justify contrasting political and ethical positions - somewhere between right-wing individualism and the communitarian left, between selfishness and altruism (Kember, 2003: 48). 

In contrast to Dawkins's view of the passive human organism, Steven Rose argues for an active human subject that is capable of acting upon the world. Echoing Marx, he claims 'we have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit in circumstances not of our own choosing' (in Kember, 2003: 22; I am thinking here of the Brumaire quote). Thus is a thoroughly humanist approach that gives some hope for human agency but not in terms of autonomy but 'auto-poeisis' - making the agents neither determined or determining but thoroughly dynamic and active all the same. The term auto-poeisis (from poeisis meaning creation) is taken from the work of Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela in 1971, to describe production and reproduction of living organisms in this way as anti-reductionist (Kember, 2003: 23). This is also an argument against what Evelyn Fox Keller calls the 'endgame' of molecular biology in discovering the ultimate code or secrets of life (Kember, 2003: 25) secrets bound up in sexual politics around reproduction. Thus, artificial life is a heterosexist discourse - if one removed the desire to reproduce from a definition of life, different models would emerge perhaps based more on metabolism and less on reproduction. Kember sees autonomous creation as masculine and without the female body rendering it obsolete. The computer is a 'pristine birthing environment' without mess (2003: 75).

To avoid genetic determinism and account for otherwise unaccountable social and cultural complexity, Dawkins proposes 'meme' to characterise the cultural aspect of evolution (a hybrid term combining the Greek word for imitate 'mimeme' and gene of course). These memes, according to Dawkins, are ideas that pass from human to human but still subject to the laws of natural selection. There may be agency but only in a selfish sense (like the gene) in response to the scarcity of resources and survival. Kember sees a paradox and weakness here: 
'Free will, it would seem, simultaneously counters and legitimises determinism. Metaphors of genetic and memetic agency and the ideological loop-hole which Dawkins constructs within them permeate the creation of artificial life worlds which are, to this extent, biologically determined.' (2003: 39) 
Genes and memes articulate very little about something as complex as society at large. Both socio-biology and evolutionary biology mount ideological challenges to the determinism of Darwinian biology. 

[note: obvious parallel here between debates about theories of evolution and generative work]

The concept of auto-poeisis is useful in this respect as it offers a model of limited agency, but one that is neither determined nor determining. Similarly in the discourse around artificial life, contradictions abound. A clear indication of this is the 'creationist' imperative of making artificial life at all even if this is in itself an exploration of evolutionary ideas - God re-emerges as the creator of life either embodied in the computer, program or programmer. These contradictions of genesis or natural selection are mentioned by Kember in her discussion of Dawkins and his 'biomorph' program in which the development, reproduction and evolution of natural life forms is simulated (2003: 54). Similar conclusions might be made about artistic work in this area, where complex forms emerge from an initial blueprint in shared authorship between creator and computer. Many artists working in this area are searching for bio-aesthetic or 'transgenic' form that takes into account behaviour as part of the creative work but much of it employs crude analogies (Eduardo Kac's transgenic rabbit Alba is one provocative example that does engage with the discourse; Techosphere, circa 1995, is one particularly illustrative example). Perhaps computer programming in general, and especially concerning genetic algorithms, suffers from a masculinist fantasy of creation - or is this argument simply too crude and biologically determinist (VNS Matrix's computer game in which the heroine sabotages the Big Daddy main frame comes to mind)? Without doubt, there is much critical work to be done by feminists and cultural commentators in this field introducing some 'humanism' into debates dominated by structuralist thinking that tends to deny human agency in favour of the structuring of the system. 

Much work in this area seeks to simulate life and to generate increased levels of complexity, and in so-doing redefine what might be considered a life-form beyond simply carbon-based life in actual space. Of course, much so-called natural life is artificial anyway - pets, animals in captivity, or influenced by human intervention (something John Berger points out in his essay 'Why Look at Animals?', 1980).  
[note: vivaria situates itself in this context]
In general the term 'artificial life' is an oxymoron, in that it can only ever be an artificial simulation of life and it can only exist in an artificial environment. In this way, it owes its currency once more to post-structuralist thinking in considering the boundary between what is real and the copy as somewhat blurred, or even that simulation has indeed replaced the real (Baudrillard). For instance, Thomas Ray's 'Tierra' is a simulation of life in a virtual computer environment - simply machine instructions, self-replicating algorithms (Kember, 2003: 60). The claim is that although the forms are artificial they describe an evolutionary, emergent and complex process that is actual (Kember quoting Langton, 2003: 63). Indeed, some cultural commentators take 'connectionist' models (where complexity is developed from the bottom up and by parallel-processing or neural networks) and apply them to cultural phenomena.

In general, the critical work in this field is notably lacking - or emergent perhaps. Crude analogies abound between technical and social systems. The term 'synthesis' is used in this field to describe emergent properties (not in terms of dialectics) that are too often reduced to the magic of the computer system or program rather than the work of the systems designer or programmer. Computer code is anthropomorphised and the 'organism/machine analogy is 'naturalised' through a bio-technological ideology (Kember, 2003: 77, citing the work of Hayles once more). The field is full of contradiction and wild claims orientated around the dialectic of creation and evolution. 

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Note: one might think of 'interbreeding' rather than interdisciplinary work