Junk Culture and the Post-Genomic Age

 
In the spring of 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published a series of papers in Nature that led them to claim that DNA is “the molecular basis of the template needed for genetic replication” (qtd. in Watson 246). The papers paved the way for Watson and Crick to receive the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology, in turn validating what Crick had famously termed the “Central Dogma”: the view that information, in the form of biochemical blueprints, flows one-way from DNA to RNA to proteins. This causal process continues to inform the paradigm in molecular biology according to which DNA is “the most important component of the cell, its ‘master plan'” (Strasser 493). What the Central Dogma has struggled to accommodate, however, is so-called junk DNA: those DNA bases that do not code for protein (some 98.5% in the human genome) and hence appear to be excessive, or to have no genetic function (Bardini 20, 29-30).
 
Thierry Bardini’s Junkware, a recent title from Minnesota’s Posthumanities series, interrogates this very paradigm by considering the biological fact and cultural significance of junk DNA. For Bardini, junk DNA is both master trope and fringe element of an era in which human beings are becoming “junkware”: “a new kind of slave[,] enslaved in our code itself” and subject to a “disposable and recyclable” society of workers, consumers, and spectators (7, 9). Bardini defines junk as “the quintessential rhizomatous genus” of Homo nexus, an emergent subjectivity at once individuated and networked (13). To develop this argument, Part One of Junkware (“Biomolecular Junk”) traces the cybernetic view of biological life through its “blind spot” of junk DNA. In Part Two (“Molar Junk: Hyperviral Culture”), Bardini shifts from the social study of modern genetics to offer a cultural theory of junk more widely construed. Throughout, his method is one of accumulation, aggregation, and critique. Junkware sifts through an array of materials that includes science fiction, online wikis, Google search results, epistemology, cybernetics, critical theory, and mass media coverage of everything from the Human Genome Project to gene therapy. A cross-disciplinary scholar, Bardini’s voice in Junkware ranges from that of the high theorist to that of the pop culture critic to that of the social scientist.
 
Bardini’s project makes two interventions: one in the discourse of biopolitics and one in the history of genetics. As for the former, Bardini sees the ultimate horizons of capitalism as the “invention of genetic capital” and the systematization of “living money” in the form not only of animal and human bodies but also of tissues, organs, and genes (11). Here, we can situate Junkware within recent work on what sociologist Nikolas Rose and others term “life itself.” The thesis of Junkware resonates most clearly with Nicole Shukin’s contention in Animal Capital that late capitalism has literalized commodity fetishism by turning biological life into currency, while the free market system has simultaneously become vulnerable to “novel diseases erupting out of the closed loop” of biocapital (16-19). In Tactical Media, Rita Raley suggests that late capitalism and critical theory participate in a feedback loop, whereby the material procedures of late capital both determine and are determined by the theoretical terms of biopolitical critique. Raley observes, for example, that capitalist ideologies of mutation and adaptation cross-pollinate with postmodern theory, as in Fredric Jameson’s argument that late capitalism operates like a biological virus (129).
 
In Junkware’s historiography of genetics, Bardini engages the work of both Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to claim that twenty-first century society morphs beyond both the disciplinary societies of the industrial era and the control societies of the post-industrial era. In “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Deleuze argues that the third stage of capitalist society hinges on “floating rates of exchange” and “a continuous network” in which the individual and the collective “orbit” one another. Seeing a fourth stage of capitalism on the horizon, Bardini writes, “the latest episode in the modern civilization . . . is the cybernetic decoding and organizing of the flows of human nature itself, DNAs and bits, to the point that one now feels compelled to complete their enumeration, be it ‘an animal, a tool, a machine . . . or a human being‘” (128; emphasis in original). Bardini then makes perhaps his most important contribution to critical theory by asking what happens under genetic capitalism to ethics, understood as the work of determining the forms that freedom can take (131). Bardini’s scholarly interventions come into particular focus in Chapter Four, which explores the possibility that DNA might form the basis, however commodifiable, for a new collectivity of human and nonhuman beings (137). To “take control over your [junk] DNA,” Bardini elaborates, might be the next wave of liberation politics (143). In a mode of counter-intuitive and playful reasoning characteristic of Junkware, Bardini concludes that, if humans share 99.9 percent of our coding DNA, perhaps it is the junk that defines the potential for individuation. “Could it be,” he asks, “that DNA is the expression both of a common nature and of the singularity of a given individual? Could DNA be both the software and the junkware of life, always common and singular . . . molecular and molar?” (144).
 
In Part One of Junkware, Bardini explains how the standard paradigm within molecular biology stems from both Crick’s Central Dogma and the pervasive use of cybernetic metaphors (such as code, signal, noise, and feedback) to explain genetic phenomena. The section connects the Human Genome Project’s April 2003 announcement that only 26,000-31,000 of the human genome’s 3 billion DNA bases are coding genes back to German botanist Hans Winkler’s 1920 publication on “excess DNA” (29-30). We learn, however, that it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that geneticists began to hash out the potential function of junk DNA, a term Korean-American scientist Susumu Ohno coined in 1972. Bardini analyzes a series of articles published in Nature and conducts interviews with both respected and fringe scientists to tell the story of how the potentially paradigm-shifting revelation of non-coding DNA was made to fit neatly into the Central Dogma. As Bardini puts it, “if certain parts of DNA do not code for protein synthesis, it is because [for most molecular biologists] they have no function at all . . . they are nothing more than ‘vestiges of ancient information,’ . . . . the source of noise” (33). In order for DNA to remain the medium for transmitting genetic information to RNA and on to protein molecules, then, the vast sea of non-coding DNA had to become that which we no longer need but hold on to just in case: junk.
 
Describing the cybernetic metaphor at the heart of the Central Dogma as the “bootstrap program” (or original premise) of modern genetics, Bardini digs into two different interpretations of junk DNA. The first comes from Richard Dawkins’s controversial 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which compares the “fossilized” presence of junk DNA in cells to “the surface of an old [computer] disc that has been much used for editing text” (qtd. in Bardini 37). On this view, the body is simply the medium for the computational processes of genes. Crick himself affirms this view in a 1980 Nature article that aligns the “junk DNA” and “selfish DNA” concepts. In response, developmental biologists Thomas Cavalier-Smith and Gabriel Dover put forward the alternative view that non-coding DNA must serve a function—perhaps in the form of cell regulation. The key point here comes late in Chapter One, when Bardini—citing the work of science studies scholars Evelyn Fox Keller and Daniel J. Kevles—observes that modern genetics has been both advanced and constrained by “its choice of words” (47): “The discoveries of the structure and the code of DNA lead one to believe that genes were not a hypothesis anymore [as they had been for Mendel]. They had acquired the only existence scientists seem to believe in, physical, that is, material existence” (51). DNA, seen as the biochemical structure for genes, thus comes to signify a material entity that has only one “meaning”: the “bootstrap program” for protein synthesis and biological inheritance (52).
 
The junk concept was thus quickly folded into the guiding cybernetic metaphor of molecular biology as scientists relegated non-coding DNA to the status of “backup” files for coding DNA (67). In Chapter Two, this story develops through Bardini’s excellent account of bioinformatics, which dovetails with the arguments that Eugene Thacker advances in Biomedia. Bioinformatics centers on DNA sequencing and recombinant DNA, and the field, Bardini points out, both drives and is driven by the capitalization of genes and by patent applications for particular DNA sequences and genetically modified organisms. For Thacker, the twin fields of bioinformatics (the use of computing technologies to sequence, catalog, and patent genes) and biocomputing (the use of DNA to do computational work) are moving beyond the dualism of “technology as tool” and “body as meat” upon which the tool works by interleaving the biological and digital domains (6-7). Bardini is less utopian than Thacker about bioinformatics, which becomes the ideal site for biocapital investment, Junkware contends, when molecular biology is seduced and subsumed by a “deluge of data” (22).
 
Tracing the semantic distinctions among junk, garbage, and trash, Bardini goes on to claim for junk DNA—and for the wider junk culture he surveys—not an absence of function but rather the possibility of future “usability” (66). This claim leads into a theoretical riff on teleology (Aristotle’s final causes), loops (especially feedback loops), and folds (from Deleuze and Guattari). The specter of junk DNA yokes this matrix of citations, and shows that molecular biology is not causal but “loopy”: structured around loops within loops of DNA that are both subject and object of a genetic program. Bardini provocatively concludes here that the program metaphor makes rather than describes a reality by turning us into computing beings and DNA into our new brand; at the same time, genetics becomes an information science. Bioinformatics is the quintessential example of this sea change as a “big yet distributed” experimental practice, the engine of which is a “new cyber-proletarian class” whose work revolves at once around repetitive routines and iterative tinkering (Bardini 83). The upshot of all this? To cite Bardini, the “biological understanding of life has become a software problem,” while natural history has lost its once prominent status within the life sciences (87; emphasis in original). As such, junk is not the “dark matter” that troubles the ideological assumptions and experimental practices of biology but rather the “best remaining opportunity for data mining” (89).
 
In Chapter Three, Bardini turns to what he calls pseudo-scientific views on junk DNA that move wildly away from the Central Dogma and its cybernetic metaphors. While the chapter is the least fleshed-out part of a book that has an otherwise elegant structure, it does provide us a glimpse of the unsettling partnership—collusion, one might say—between intelligent design proponents and disaffected scientists. This “fuzzy configuration” includes those who interpret junk DNA as evidence of the so-called “Zero Point Field” concept promoted by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which views all matter as connected in a “bio-quantum Web” (100, 109; emphasis in original). Bardini concludes Part One of Junkware on a cryptic note by offering us a bizarre interview he conducted with Colm Kelleher, who left a career in molecular biology to work on intelligent design for a Las Vegas billionaire and National Institute for Discovery Science funder.
 
Part Two of the book moves from this “molecular” lens on junk DNA to what Bardini terms, borrowing from biological terminology, a “molar” level of analysis through which he fleshes out the post-genomic era’s socio-cultural forms of junk. “Homo Nexus, Disaffected Subject” (the subtitle of Chapter Five) opens with Canadian science fiction writer Alfred Elton van Voght’s cult hit The Voyage of the Space Beagle, which imagines a future transdisciplinary science centered at the aptly named Nexial Foundation. Bardini launches from this text to explore the link between nexus and junk: a link that is at once semantic and socio-economic. “Today you are whom you produce,” he argues. “You are the producer of the appearance of reality that is called ‘your life.’ You are the offered and yet invisible image of the spectacle of your intimacy” (155).
 
Chapter Six (“Presence of Junk”), the book’s penultimate, is its most compelling. In it, Bardini moves across a fascinating set of primary materials to argue that junk is not just the name given to the non-coding, not-yet-understood part of DNA, but also the “binding principle” that holds contemporary society together: “what we ingest (junk food), where we live (junk space), what we trade frantically (junk bonds), our communications (junk mail), our (more or less) recreational drugs (just junk)” (169). The key question of Junkware here becomes, “How, and when exactly, did our culture turn to junk?” (169). While Bardini does not fully answer this interrogative, he does offer several provocative cultural instances of junkware: Philip K. Dick’s narrative image of kipple, Rem Koolhaas’s architectural theory of “junkspace,” Derrida’s philosophical account of the virus, and scientist-turned-Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s “junkyard bombs.” Put simply, junk is for Bardini the organizing rubric of the culture that comes after postmodernism. It is, to invoke Jameson, the logic of genetic capitalism.
 
Bardini gestures toward a potential counter-culture within this post-genomic society by way of a final analysis of the contemporary avant-garde movement known as bioart. Practitioner Julie Reodica has offered the most cogent definition of bioart as both an art praxis and a social movement: in bioart, she writes, “an artist utilizes emerging biotechnologies from the scientific and medical fields in the creation of an artwork” that works to turn those technologies away from their commercial and ideological procedures (414-15). Bardini discusses three such bioart projects: the tactical media work of Critical Art Ensemble and the transgenic art of Joe Davis and of Eduardo Kac. Bardini separates bioart into two broad categories: (1) inscriptions of text into bacterial DNA that do not alter the genetic code but instead add to the host organism’s junk DNA, and (2) inscriptions that alter the DNA so as to create new proteins and, in some cases, new forms of life. At once technical and participatory, Kac’s 1999 installation “Genesis” translated Genesis 1.26 into Morse code and then, via a conversion principle, into a DNA sequence. With the help of medical researchers, Kac had the sequence (along with a fluorescent marker) inserted into an E. coli bacteria population. The genetically modified bacteria were then installed in a gallery space under a video projector and UV light, to encourage growth and to aid spectators in viewing the bacteria. Via a project website, participants could choose to change the amount of UV light to which the bacteria were exposed and thus affect the rate of bacterial growth and mutation. At the installation’s close, the now mutated “artist’s gene” (as Kac termed it) was translated back into a presumably nonsense sentence in English.
 
In What is Posthumanism?, Cary Wolfe argues that Kac’s particular take on bioart is not representational in any conventional sense. Rather, Wolfe explains, “Kac’s theatricalization of visuality” shows us “what must be witnessed is not just what we can see” (167). Bardini extends this claim by observing that “the visible has given way to the readable” in this multimedia form of art, which is also, as I have argued elsewhere, a form of routinized scientific practice (202-203). Bardini’s case study on bioart leads into a culminating definition of the book’s often spectral title word: junkware. In bioart, contemporary culture moves from the “Body without Organs (BwO) to the Organs without Body (OwB)” (204). Bioart, as Raley suggests, thus offers one of the more radical performances and critiques of biocapitalism. For Bardini, “bioartists thus create pieces that link computational systems (hardware and software) and organic matter (wetware), sometimes creating hybrids or chimeras, monstrous or invisible (albeit readable) effects, all belonging to what I call junkware. In so doing they participate in the production of a body that is both, in fact, a new body and a reconfiguration of the original (‘natural’) body” (205). This claim for bioart highlights the central investments of Junkware: a thickly critical yet ultimately optimistic (not to mention playful) rejoinder to the cybernetic dogma of molecular biology, to the economic machinations of genetic capitalism, and to a trajectory in Foucauldian theory that focuses on power at the expense of attention to play. The final words of Junkware re-think the claims of Giorgio Agamben: “Let us attune our ears again to the clamors of being. No more single choices, no more present world as it is, but many compossible and incompossible worlds patiently awaiting their anamnesis. Not only ‘the memory of the time in which man was not yet man,’ but also this memory of a time to come in which overman was not man anymore” (214).