Code-Scripting the Body: Sex and the Onto-Theology of Bioinformatics

Cyberscience . . . was developed to deal with the messy complexity of the postmodern world, over the very same period of time in which molecular biology was crafting its techniques for analyzing the simplest strata of life. The one repudiated conventional wisdom about the analytic value of simplicity, whereas the other embraced it; the one celebrated complexity, whereas the other disdained it.
 

(85)

From Keller’s perspective, cyberscience and molecular biology emerged at the same moment in time, yet took different paths. Such an account, however, makes it difficult to explain the influence that discourses of information, of coding, and of cybernetic control and communication have had on the constitution of contemporary biological science. It may perhaps be more useful to look at cyberscience itself as an uneasy amalgam of two divergent tendencies-an ambiguous embrace of complexity and freedom at the level of the living organism or cybernetic system, counteracted by a desire for order and determinism at the level of the code or message, which idealizes the simple, linear transmission of information and the exclusion of noise.

 
In this essay, I suggest that this dual perspective and tension can be found in the work of cyberscience pioneers like Edwin Schrödinger, Norbert Wiener, and Claude Shannon. Moreover, I argue that although cyberscience may appear to offer a single, biotechnological framework that posits a disembodied conception of life, the competing tendencies towards organicism and informatics at work within this framework feed into two central and interrelated tensions that inhabit modern biological thought. The first of these tensions concerns the efforts of biologists to dispel the specter of God, or what is often referred to as “vitalism,” underlying the conceptualization of nature, and which appears frequently in the persistent religious imagery that the concept of information bears through its association with metaphors of text, writing, and the “Book of Nature” (Brandt).² The second tension involves the concept of (hetero)sexual difference and its substitution for God as guarantor of the legibility of a natural order and the possibility of biological knowledge. I suggest that sex is often an unrecognized point of articulation between these tensions and, as such, is central to the potential of bioinformatic bodies.
 

Life vs. Thermodynamics

 
The story of how Gregor Mendel’s pioneering work in genetics was rediscovered and incorporated into studies of inheritance in the early twentieth century is well known. This event inaugurated a period of research activity generally known as “classical genetics,” which extends up to Watson and Crick’s 1953 model of DNA. Working with a chromosomal theory of inheritance, classical geneticists focused on the study of mutations in their attempts to follow the path that Mendel had opened up-a path that led towards the subindividual, molecular level of life-but their efforts were frustrated by the limits of their resolving power. Individual chromosomes appeared unwilling to divulge the genetic secrets they held, and resisted all attempts at decomposition by the scientific gaze. The sought-after revelation of the structure of DNA was only to be achieved through the intervention of ideas from the physical and chemical sciences in combination with certain technical and rhetorical innovations. Indeed, in 1944, it was a physicist who made a decisive entry into the biological field. Erwin Schrödinger’s What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell exerted a formative influence over the constitution and shape of early molecular biology. Schrödinger’s book drew many physicists and chemists into the biological conversation, and provided them with a metaphorical vocabulary and way of thinking about “life” that was to shape biological discourse at the molecular level.
 
Like Mendel, Schrödinger brought a physicist’s concern for the lawful mechanics of matter to the study of biological phenomena. Each sought to give an account of the physics of “life itself.” Unlike Mendel’s Newtonian physics, however, the explicit impetus for Schrödinger’s intervention lay in questions posed by quantum theory and the science of thermodynamics. This is important because the second law of thermodynamics, in particular, challenges the centrality of the reproductive imperative in nature by suggesting that the telos of life is ultimately death. At the same time, however, the apparent stability and reproduction of organic life puts the second law, which posits the existence of a universal cosmic tendency towards dissipation, disorder, and eventually entropic heat-death, into question as the immortality of biological life across generations seems to elude the reach of the physicist’s explanatory powers. From the time of Mendel through to the moment of Schrödinger’s challenge to the uneasy confidence of biological epistemology, a tension between the dissipating force of thermodynamic physical law on one side, and the organizing power of organic life on the other, inhabits the natural sciences.³
 
In What is Life, Schrödinger draws upon twentieth-century quantum theory in an effort to explain how the reproductive order of life-as represented by the living organism-defies the second law, and therefore requires the formulation of a new physics. Gesturing towards what would later become the predominant understanding of DNA, Schrödinger argues that the chromosomes within a fertilized egg must “contain in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual’s future development and of its functioning in the mature state” (22). Governed by this code-script, an organism maintains itself “by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy” (76). Organic life, for Schrödinger, is characterized by its ability to renew its own organized nature continuously by feeding off the natural order around it. Rather than manifesting unpredictability at the micro level, while submitting to a slow decline towards eventual heat-death at the macro level, the organism resembles the stable, orderly functioning of a pure “clockwork,” which is able to resist the second law of thermodynamics. For Schrödinger, “the point of resemblance between a clockwork and an organism . . . is simply and solely that the latter also hinges upon a solid-the aperiodic crystal forming the hereditary substance, largely withdrawn from the disorder of heat motion” (91). He speculates that this molecular quantum state allows the organism to defeat thermodynamic decay. In other words, the time of the organism is its own. The aperiodicity of what will later be called the genome allows nature to reproduce itself in a process that Schrödinger calls “order from order.”
 
In this new physics of life, Schrödinger’s influential contribution is the idea of a “code-script,” which he likens to an “all-penetrating mind” that always already knows the future development of the organism (22). The term “code” implies that there is an underlying systematicity to nature, or a technic that is fundamental to life itself. Yet a code is also something that conjures up secrecy. Presumably, the secret possessed by a genetic code-script concerns the origin of the natural order that sustains the life of the organism as it battles thermodynamic entropy. For modern biological thought, the secret may lie in a quasi teleological concept of (hetero)sexual desire, which is itself a surrogate for God. At least, I claim this is what holds for Schrödinger’s intervention.
 
Today, What is Life? is conventionally regarded as the first text to propose that the essence of life lies in an underlying genetic code. James Watson, for example, credits Schrödinger’s book as his inspiration for turning to genetic questions as it offered a mechanism for reducing biological life to a potentially decipherable “instruction book inscribed in a secret code” (36). This is a common reading of Schrödinger, yet I think it oversimplifies his position. In Schrödinger’s desire for a “new physics” there is a good deal of ambiguity around the question of whether the code-script of life may be deciphered through the optic of modern science. Watson recasts the notion of code in such a way as to evacuate the secret of its secrecy. He presumes the secret of life to be simply hidden below the surface, awaiting discovery by a technoscientific key that will unlock the chemical-mechanical order. Yet in important respects, Schrödinger’s work runs counter to this approach. For example, he claims that, “It seems neither adequate nor possible to dissect into discrete ‘properties’ the pattern of an organism which is essentially a unity, a ‘whole'” (30). Indeed, Schrödinger’s characterization of life in terms of discrete systems that change via “quantum jumps” might well be better read as anticipating recent theories of complexity and self-organization.
 
In an alternative reading of Schrödinger’s text, the biophysicist Robert Rosen holds that the argument of What is Life? is actually “quite incompatible with the dogmas of today” (6). On Rosen’s reading, Schrödinger did not believe that life itself could be reduced to a code-script that may be deciphered by modern science. On the contrary, the secrecy of the code was of paramount importance to its functioning. Rosen argues that answering the question posed in What is Life? would require coming to terms with life as something that escapes the predictive laws of physics. For him, in claiming that the organism feeds upon negative entropy (or information), Schrödinger “was saying that, for the entire process of order from order to work at all, the system exhibiting it has to be open in some crucial sense” (17). From this perspective, the living organism constitutes a complex open system that exchanges energy, matter, and information with its environment. Hence, for Rosen, the new physics of life envisioned by Schrödinger “can be expressed as a shift from material causations of behavior, manifested in state sets, to formal and efficient causations” (27). This reading, however, still relies upon a somewhat restricted account of causality. I suggest that, for Schrödinger, the “secret” of life is not merely that the organism is a thermodynamically open system; rather, there is for him the matter of a final cause. Moreover, here we find the signs of a divine perspective in the place of the “demon” that is central to the history of thermodynamics.
 
Maxwell’s Demon is the name given to an imaginary being conceived by the physicist James Maxwell in the 1860s in order to explain how it might be possible to thwart the second law of thermodynamics. This demonic entity was charged with combating the increase of entropy within a closed system by controlling the flow of molecules in such a way that no work is performed, and hence no heat/energy is lost. The question of whether this scenario would be consistent with other tenets of physics has been subject to much dispute, but the crucial point for us here is found in Keller’s suggestion that a line can be drawn from Maxwell’s Demon right through to Schrödinger’s code-script. Insofar as the code-script directs the biological reproduction of life, it runs counter to the entropic tendency and serves the same purpose as the demon. “The most important point,” Keller claims, “is [the demon’s] shift in reference from God to humanlike intelligence” (55). Yet in what sense does Schrödinger’s code-script really express a human form of intelligence? While the metaphors may in general have become more technological rather than theological over the intervening hundred years, I would argue that What is Life? still advocates a thoroughly onto-theological conception of the demon that governs life-and its (sexual) reproduction.⁴
 
According to Schrödinger, the biological organism (qua open system) is informed by the order of nature. It is able to do this because the secret code of life, identified with the demon or all-penetrating mind, enables inner and outer nature to be harmonized according to the laws governing the production of order from order. The effect of this move, however, is to push back the question of the ultimate source of natural order. It may have been in response to this question-implicitly formulated by the logic of his scientific enquiry-that Schrödinger composed the epilogue to What is Life? Although entitled “On Determinism and Free Will,” the key opposition informing this supplement is clearly that of physics and biology, a reprise of the tension that animates the book as a whole. On the one hand, the mechanistic laws of nature that inform the living organism appear inviolable; on the other hand, in life we experience freedom in our thoughts and actions. Schrödinger’s conclusion is as follows:
 

The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I-I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind who has ever said or felt “I”-am the person, if any, who controls the “motion of the atoms” according to the Laws of Nature. Within a cultural milieu where certain conceptions . . . have been limited and specialized, it is daring to give this conclusion the simple wording that it requires. In Christian terminology to say: “Hence I am God Almighty” sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving God and immortality at one stroke.
 

(93)

Most readers of What is Life?, particularly those biologists who abhor nothing more than the stain of vitalism or religion, may have disregarded the epilogue. Schrödinger’s exclamation-“I have become God”-is often regarded as an unfortunate and embarrassing lapse of judgment from a somewhat eccentric scientist. His readers would prefer to consider the text to be complete, closed off as an organic whole, before the page is turned to the epilogue. But what if this confession of the onto-theological basis of Schrödinger’s speculations on life represents the return of that which biological science must always push away in order to maintain its identity?

 
Schrödinger’s epilogue opens up the thermodynamic system of the (human) organism to a divine consciousness that informs living matter. The freedom inherent to life, however, is not possessed by the individual; rather, it is an onto-theological secret that inhabits the subindividual level of life as it flows on through and beyond its temporary instantiations in individual organisms. The conscious mind may be that which allows us to recognize our identity, but it is not the essence of life itself. Indeed, Schrödinger never explicitly defines life in his text. It appears as a somewhat mysterious, natural force that organizes thermodynamically open systems, and which evades the tendency towards maximum entropy. What remains implicit here is the fact that it is the (hetero)sexual reproduction of the organism that ensures the immortality of living matter. It is worth noting that concepts of (hetero)sexual difference first make an appearance in What is Life? at the very moment when Schrödinger sets out his account of the code of life:
 

As we shall see in a moment, one set [of chromosomes] comes from the mother (egg cell), one from the father (fertilizing spermatozoon). It is these chromosomes . . . that contain in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual’s future development and of its functioning in the mature state.
 

(22)

The code that controls the development of life and governs its functioning, and which assures its ultimate victory over time, is a script that presumes (hetero)sexual reproduction. While Schrödinger’s initial concern is with life at the level of the organism-a concept that is essentially defined in terms of its (hetero)sexual organization-his concept of a code-script translates the reproduction of life into bioinformatic terms at the subindividual level. It challenges the sexual energies of nature according to an atemporal framework that has already determined their place and functioning in life, and yet the translation between levels is left unexplained. The dual nature of the concept of sex-both being and doing-is implied here, yet remains implicit. The secret of life lies just beyond the limits of Schrödinger’s scientific vision.

 
Schrödinger, then, introduces into genetic science the metaphor of the code of life with implicit and interrelated connections to both onto-theology and (hetero)sexual difference. The way in which this was to be picked up in the emergent discipline of molecular biology depended to a large extent, however, upon the resonance that readers of What is Life? found with two other major intellectual tributaries of the mid-twentieth century: information theory and cybernetics.
 

Life in the Information Age

 
Discourses that concern the notion of information have been crucial in shaping the theory and practice of molecular biology since its earliest days. Nevertheless, the concept of biological information has always suffered from a degree of ill-definition and semantic slipperiness. Its elucidatory value within biology has frequently been the subject of considerable dispute, which continues today among philosophers of science (Maynard Smith; Sarkar) as it does among social and cultural critics. It can be argued that informatic theories have always been more of a metaphorical resource than a source of rigorous concepts imported into the life sciences. The language of coding and information has functioned as “rhetorical software” (to employ Richard Doyle’s term) for biological discourses that have been enamored with computer science metaphors since the 1940s. At that time, Schrödinger was posing the question of life, and of its code-script, in a way that complemented and fed into two other influential contemporary approaches to problems concerning the communication of information and the control of bodies (both mechanical and living): Claude Shannon’s information theory, and Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic theory. This section discusses the former, while cybernetics is the topic of the following section.
 
Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication put forward an unconventional quantitative concept of information, which, like Schrödinger’s understanding of life, bears an essential relation to the thermodynamic notion of entropy. Shannon and Weaver’s concept of information, however, was defined as having a positive correlation with entropy, rather than as resisting it. On first appearances, then, information and life seem to be divergent concepts. At the same time, however, there were many structural and rhetorical similarities between the two ideas that served to draw them together. Not least of these convergences was the connection that each maintained to a certain notion of freedom that could only be realized through coding.
 
For Shannon and Weaver, its coding is the primary means by which the information value of a freely-selected message is protected against the threat that transmission would be disrupted due to noise. Moreover, they state that “[communication] theory contributes importantly to, and in fact is really the basic theory of cryptography which is, of course, a form of coding” (115). Information requires a protective code in order that it may (secretly) reach its destination safely. In this formulation, information begins to appear as structurally similar to Schrödinger’s onto theological concept of life, which also comes to our attention through the mediation of a code-script. The convergence becomes all the more apparent when we consider that, for Shannon and Weaver, the measure of information is defined in relation to entropy, while for Schrödinger (and for the biological tradition more generally), life is defined through an antagonistic relation to the dissipating forces of death. Thus, in a sense, information theory makes apparent something that was implicit in biological discourse all along. In both cases, the freedom that belongs to information or to life is a product of the entropic disorder that sustains-through its opposition-the organization and order to be maintained. The concept of a (secret) code enables the reproduction and development of life, or the transmission of information, to take place within a context of overall disorganization.
 
In Shannon and Weaver’s mathematical theory of communication, information is a quantitative measure of a particular message relative to the complete set of all possible messages that could have been transmitted in a given situation. The more entropy or disorder there is in a situation, the more freedom there is in selecting a message, and consequently the higher the information value it will have. As they put it, “this word information in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say” (100). To take an example that is germane to our interests here, from the perspective of Shannon and Weaver’s theory, the determination of sex provides very little information. When a baby is born and it is proclaimed that “It’s a boy!” or that “It’s a girl!” we gain little information because there is very little freedom in the situation. Under the ontological limitations of (hetero)sexual difference, the options are restricted to a binary choice: male or female, boy or girl. Irrespective of the meaning attributed to this event, the message we receive is one of the only two options allowed, hence its information value is negligible.
 
An interesting consequence of the importation of Shannon and Weaver’s information theory into biological thought is precisely its relation to (hetero)sexual difference. The rejection of meaning as a relevant aspect of information theory is a key feature here. The transmission and reception of a message are conceptualized simply as an engineering problem. Shannon and Weaver insist that, “information must not be confused with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information” (99). The meaning of a message is bracketed in order that its statistical aspects can be calculated. While the productiveness and influence of this method for genetic science are widely recognized, such an approach can actually be traced right back to Mendel’s mid-nineteenth-century experiments in breeding pea plants. While organic life in nineteenth-century thought was conceptualized in terms of the organizing force of (hetero)sexual difference, Mendel bypassed questions of sexual difference as he prepared the way for biological thought to descend to the molecular level-a move that anticipates the eventual emergence of contemporary reproductive technologies that bypass sex at the level of the organism. Information theory, as conceived by Shannon and Weaver, reinvigorates this move whereby statistical analysis becomes the key to understanding how discrete information is produced and transmitted across time without any essential relationship to a higher level of organization or meaning. Because the living organism is implicitly defined by its (hetero)sexual organization, the concept of biological information, alongside the schema of arbitrary messages that are freely selected, effectively frees up the sexual forces of life to a certain extent. Even though the implications may not have been apparent at the time, the equation of the technological transmission of information with life allows the freedom of relatively unstructured nonorganic relations to silently inhabit the body of molecular biology.
 
From this perspective, Shannon and Weaver’s theory should not be considered as a wholly external influence imposed upon biology, for genetic science has always been implicitly figured in informatic terms. Yet insofar as the transmission of biological information comes to be taken as analogous to the reproduction of life, information theory implies a new role for sex within genetic science-one that has proven difficult to reconcile with the onto-theological commitments of earlier biological thought. Like Mendel, information theory posits the transmission of a stable message based on a statistical measure, but within the biological tradition a meaningful notion of (hetero)sexual difference, and its correlate “species,” ensure continuity in the natural order. An unarticulated tension is thereby inherent to the concept of “biological information”-which is both reductive and yet possesses the potential for a renewed understanding of freedom in relation to biological and social life. In this situation, one may easily be led to evoke a divine force that will account for the free expression and natural order of life (as was the case with Schrödinger), and this is never more apparent than in early cybernetic theory.
 

Information, Entropy, and Cybernetics

 
Norbert Wiener’s project of constructing a cybernetic science, begun in the context of military research the early 1940s, was undertaken in conversation with Shannon and Weaver’s work. In his two most influential books, however, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (first published in 1948) and The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (first published in 1950), Wiener goes beyond the design of conventional communication systems to construct a research program that crosses the boundaries separating machine from animal from human. As such, his work is important for its attempt to understand the ways in which life or the body can be regarded as open to technology. He was especially concerned with the role of feedback processes in enabling a system to adapt to new circumstances through time. Systems, whether technological, social, or biological, which incorporate feedback hold the potential for adjusting themselves to deal with changing situations. Crucially for Wiener, to be effective as feedback the information content of a message must be resolutely defended against attacks of “noise.” Like Schrödinger, he was interested in the implications of quantum theory for the understanding of life, especially in the lack of absolute determinacy that it implies, and for the possibilities it holds for explaining the maintenance of homeostasis. Rather than the immortality offered by a code-script withdrawn from the thermodynamic flux, however, Wiener believes that the stability of the organism is wholly dependent upon its acquisition and use of reliable information from the world around it. His “demon” lies in the power to inform.
 
Wiener is adamant that, “Information is information, not matter or energy” (132). As distinct from matter and energy, information alone resists the tendency towards entropy, and is thereby positioned as the essence or secret of life. Yet while citing Shannon and Weaver, Wiener characterizes information in a way that appears to oppose their position. He writes, “Just as the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorganization; and the one is simply the negative of the other” (11). Where Shannon and Weaver associate information value with entropy, Wiener opposes the two. This divergence in definition is more apparent than decisive for the import of the two theories. The crucial difference actually lies in Wiener’s extension of the concept of information in such a way that reintroduces the meaningful content of the message. While Shannon and Weaver measure information quantitatively in terms of the freedom of choice among potential messages within the communicative situation as whole, Wiener is not prepared to accept such a narrow definition of information.⁵ Most notably, by removing the bracketing of meaning from the message, and by associating information with organization, Wiener opens up the communicative system to a return of the onto-theological.
 
Just as Schrödinger’s code-script is the expression of God at the basis of life, Wiener’s concept of information evokes a divine origin for organized life. Again, in the battle of life and death, of order and entropy, we discover the underlying dynamic that shapes the situation of the natural organism or communicative system. Wiener advocates a new conception of quantum physics that will address the element of chance and contingency in the fabric of the universe. About this element of chance he writes: “For this random element, this organic incompleteness, is one which without too violent a figure of speech we may consider evil; the negative evil which St Augustine characterizes as incompleteness, rather than the positive malicious evil of the Manichaeans” (19). Entropy-the tendency towards disorganization and disorder-is the manifestation of evil; it threatens life with a slow descent into total chaos. Information resists this evil, and therefore is on the side of the good, and, as per Wiener’s reference to St Augustine, on the side of God. Cybernetics is the study of messages that organize and are, at bottom, of divine origin.
 
From this perspective, Wiener’s invocation of Shannon and Weaver’s concept of information may also reveal a hidden onto-theological aspect of their theory. For in reciting the central claim of the mathematical theory of communication, i.e. “the more probable the message, the less information it gives” (31), Weiner implicitly raises the question of the first message and of the origin of organization. Doyle points out the paradox here by noting that, while a message’s information content is tied to its improbability, there is a point of regress at which this logic collapses in upon itself: “A truly singular, unprecedented phenomenon would in some sense make no sense-we would lack the tools of signification necessary to read or interpret it” (45). For Doyle, this points to the existence of an unthought thought that necessarily precedes all communication. By bringing the meaning of the message back into the equation, Wiener may be said to expose the unthought thought of information theory, and we find that this is the secret of a divine origin. The question is: from whence would the message with the highest possible information value arise? What is the name that we may give to the source of order and organization, which first informs matter and energy? Wiener’s implicit invocation of God in this place of origin is reflected in the fact that, for him, information and life are identified with meaning: “In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful” (26). The fight against evil is one in which the meaning and natural order of life are clearly at stake. Whereas for Shannon and Weaver the freedom associated with information is sustained by entropy and disorder, Wiener gives voice to the other side of the tension between meaning and information insofar as he posits that entropy or freedom is a threat to life. Emerging out of this theoretical environment, molecular biology tends to side with Wiener, and to reaffirm the value of a stable natural order (even if its practice has often worked to undermine this same order).
 
Wiener’s distaste for entropy-for its association with irrationality, incomplete determinism, and randomness-often sounds like an aversion to a certain conception of freedom, or to the free production of nature. Similarly, concepts of (hetero)sexual difference or gender may be seen as responses to the condition of freedom that emerges in the absence of a (divine) natural order. Moreover, given that Wiener is interested in applying cybernetics to questions of biology, we expect to find a (hetero)sexual component to his account of control and communication in life. Here we turn our attention to the discussion of affective tone within the human or animal nervous system in Cybernetics. Described as a feeling of pleasure or pain that accompanies an action, this bodily affect constitutes a feedback mechanism relaying messages throughout the living organism. For Wiener, this affective system is premised upon a quasi-teleological reproductive force. He writes: “Biologically speaking, of course, a greater affective tone must occur predominantly in situations favorable for the perpetuation of the race, if not the individual, and a smaller affective tone in situations which are unfavorable for this perpetuation, if not disastrous” (128). That we might easily bring to mind many exceptions to this economy of reproductive affect is not my point; I am more interested in suggesting that Wiener has sex on his mind. In speculating on how these affective messages might be sent most efficiently, he claims that, “The high emotional and consequently affective content of hormonal activity is most suggestive” (129). This is significant because to speak of hormones in the mid-twentieth century was inevitably to speak of (hetero)sexual difference, as it was a time of intense scientific interest in the role of hormones in constituting maleness and femaleness. Wiener does not disappoint us here. Immediately, albeit somewhat hesitantly, he draws a connection between the hormonal transmission of messages and unconscious sexual drives: “in the theories of Freud the memory-the storage function of the nervous system-and the activities of sex are both involved. Sex, on the one hand, and all affective content on the other, contain a very strong hormonal element” (130). What are we to make of this association? Might this unconscious connection between sex and the hormonal feedback mechanism that coordinates affective messages be a sign of some greater force or purpose in life? Is the long-term stability and direction of life a product of this flow of (hetero)sexual information in conjunction with a feedback mechanism that regulates both communication and the control of the organism, and which must be defended against all noise if a fall into evil is to be avoided?
 
To be sure, Wiener says nothing of the sort. Yet, as Katherine Hayles has noted, he returns to the topic of hormonal flows and the circulation of sexual information between bodies in the final chapter of Cybernetics, which is ostensibly concerned with the role of communication and the flow of information in promoting homeostasis within a society. Wiener suggests that, “sexually attractive substances in the mammals may be regarded as communal, exterior hormones, indispensable, especially in solitary animals, for bringing the sexes together at the proper time” (156). Reading this passage, Hayles claims that, “The choice of examples foregrounds sexuality, but this is a kind of sex without sexuality” (109). Her point is that the cybernetic flow of information across and through living bodies threatens to dissolve the boundaries of the individual subject or autonomous self as possessor of a discrete sexual identity. At the same time, I suggest, this represents a return of the same tension that animates the work of Schrödinger. On the one hand, there is the explicit desire to affirm stability, natural order, or homeostasis in the reproduction of life; on the other hand, the concepts of coding and information theory implicitly work towards the decomposition of the individual organism. Sex is a key terrain upon which this tension is played out. As figured between God and nature, (hetero)sexual difference is presented as a crucial force of organization that connects the organic being to the natural and social orders of which it is a part. For Wiener, both the living organism and all forms of animal and human community depend upon an organizing force that resists the encroachment of noise and entropy. Evil is to be combated though that which draws living beings together, not just temporarily, but over time in a way that allows them to reproduce and to avoid death. Through (hetero)sexual difference, Wiener suggests, God and natural order are immanent to life.
 

The Bioinformatic Body

 
While the precise moment at which cyberscience began to exert a formative influence over biological science is a matter of debate, many commentators consider the discovery of DNA to be an important marker for the constitution of molecular biology as an informatic discourse. As Keller puts it, “With Watson and Crick’s invocation of ‘genetic information’ residing in the nucleic acid sequences of DNA, some notion of information (however metaphorical) assumed a centrality to molecular biology that almost rivaled that of the more technical definition of information in cybernetics” (94). The concept of genetic information was formalized in 1958 when Francis Crick laid out what was to become the key tenet of molecular biology: the Central Dogma. This is the idea of a unidirectional flow of information from DNA to RNA to proteins as the fundamental chain lying at the basis of life. The Central Dogma rejects the cybernetic notion of feedback in favor of an emphasis on the delivery of a message carefully composed at the origin of a causal chain. In Crick’s formulation, which was quickly to become accepted truth, genetic information is self-contained, inviolable, and holds the key to life. The physicist George Gamow characterized the task of gaining access to the secrets of genetic information as “breaking the code.” These two developments together firmly established informatics as the governing mode of representing nature within molecular biology. For many contemporary critics, however, this is precisely where the problems lie.
 
In How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles provides a critique of contemporary information-based cultures and the concept of virtuality. For Hayles, “The great dream and promise of information is that it can be free from the material constraints that govern the mortal world” (13). She traces this ideal back to the post-WWII period and the rise of cyberscience. On her account, the problem is not so much in the way that Shannon defines information, as a probability function divorced from context, as it is the way in which this heuristic bracketing of meaning tends to be forgotten as the concept transfers to other domains beyond communication engineering. As Hayles puts it:
 

Taken out of context, the definition allowed information to be conceptualized as if it were an entity that can flow unchanged between different material substrates . . . . Thus, a simplification necessitated by engineering considerations becomes an ideology in which a reified concept of information is treated as if it were fully commensurate with the complexities of human thought.
 

(54)

Hayles’s point to the contrary is that information must always be materially instantiated in order to exist. Her concern is that information has become disembodied today and turned into a fetish.

 
Hayles locates the emergence of this reified concept of information within a general cultural shift away from conceptualizing things in terms of presence or absence, and towards an emphasis on pattern versus randomness. She claims that Wiener’s work exemplifies this shift: “In [his] ‘dematerialized materialism’ of the battlefield where life struggles against entropy and noise, the body ceases to be regarded as a material object and instead is seen as an informational pattern” (104). For Hayles, Wiener’s concern with homeostasis exhibits too much anxiety over maintaining control of bodily boundaries, and thus closes down the possibilities that exist for rethinking what it is to be human. To her mind, the positive aspect of the posthuman condition is in its embrace of the contingency and unpredictability that goes along with reconceptualizing human being in terms of an open system. In a sense, she advocates that we affirm one of the two tendencies we have identified as coexisting within cyberscience, the tendency associated with freedom and the complexity of life, as opposed to the tendency towards affirming natural order, the simplicity of coding, and the linear transmission of informatic messages. What is not so clear, however, is whether Hayles’s antipathy towards informational discourses is necessarily on the side of freeing up these new possibilities. Indeed, it may be that the opposition she draws between information theory and cybernetics on the one hand, and embodied reality on the other, implicitly privileges a basically conservative concept of human embodiment over against other virtual or nonorganic possibilities opened up on the technoscientific landscape. For if the conceptualization of biological information enables us to think about life as freed from the straitjacket of organic function, then it may be that the disembodiment effected by informatic discourses is of a much more ambiguous and ambivalent nature than is commonly recognized.
 
Hayles’s work asks us to consider where molecular biology stands regarding the reification of information. When she notes that, “Shannon’s distinction between signal and noise had a conservative bias that privileges stasis over change” (as did Wiener’s antipathy towards entropy), Hayles evokes a charge that has been leveled against genetic science. She continues, “The structure of the theory implied that change was deviation and that deviation should be corrected” (62). This is a value that may well be inherent to any notion of a genetic code as the “secret of life”-at least, as long as that secret is conceived as a message that must be faithfully translated and read in order to assemble a body. Hayles’s critique of disembodied information suggests that the aspect of cyberscience taken up and pursued by early molecular biology has serious limitations as a way of explaining life and living beings.
 
This thesis is also pursued by Lily Kay in her study of the ways information came to signify biological specificity from the 1950s onwards. Where specific organization had once been the definitive biological trope, Kay shows that life increasingly came to be figured through a discourse of information. She makes the point that, among the intellectual excitement of cybernetic research, “The information discourse and its modes of signification bestowed upon the biological sciences-long beleaguered by Comtean inferiority-some of the high status and promise of command and control fields” (114-5). This, in turn, drew more funding to molecular biology and fuelled its growth. The promise of controlling life through the decoding of genetic information, however, has yet to be realized. From Kay’s point of view, this is unlikely to happen any time soon because information discourse is an imperfect fit for the object of biology: “The discrepancies resided in the categorical difference between the two: specificity denoting material and structural properties; information denoting nonmaterial attributes, such as soul, potentialities, and form (telos), previously captured by the notion of organization and plan (logos)” (328). As with Hayles, we find that information discourse is identified here as a dematerializing force that cannot comprehend the plenitude of nature’s materiality.
 
The central problem, as Kay describes it, is that, “Though remarkably compelling and productive as analogies, ‘information,’ ‘language,’ ‘code,’ ‘message,’ and ‘text’ have been taken as ontologies” (2-3). For her, trouble arises because the separation of domains has not been respected. The qualities of living matter are thereby not recognized for what they are in themselves. For Kay, information discourse constitutes only a partial perspective on life and is effectively a form of biopower that disciplines and attempts to control life itself. Information is seen as an essentially reductionist concept that sucks the life out of bodies. Yet, following Foucault, if biopower is also productive and promiscuous in its connections and effects, then perhaps the concept of biological information cannot be so easily characterized in terms of reductionism and disembodiment. It may be that informatic discourses are only repressive in their relation to life insofar as the latter is figured solely in organic terms.
 
Richard Doyle, to take another example, is also concerned with the deleterious effects of information discourse. In his study of the rhetorical transformations that shaped the emergence of molecular biology, he aims his critique at the informatic body. Doyle names this construction the “postvital body” and describes it as “a body in which the distinct, modern categories of surface and depth, being and living, implode into the new density of coding” (13). This is a body modeled on the computer, with its organic nature reduced to informatic codes. Eschewing analysis of communication theory and the cybernetic moment, Doyle returns us to Schrödinger’s What is Life? and emphasizes the role that the book played in effecting a “fundamental reprogramming of the rhetorical software of genetics.” For Doyle, “Schrödinger mistakes or displaces the pattern of the organism by its ‘code-script,’ injecting the life of the organism into its description” (28). Again, it is a matter of reduction-of reducing the living organism to a set of instructions. Doyle argues that Schrödinger gives voice to a previously unarticulated possibility in biological science by suggesting that, “no body, indeed, no life, need exist at all outside of the ‘aperiodic crystal’.” This means, quite simply, that “the body, and life, have disappeared” (33). As we have seen above, this is not the only possible reading of Schrödinger’s text. On the contrary, What is Life? does not necessarily set out to resolve its own question; rather, Schrödinger’s onto-theology locates the secret of life beyond the reach of a reductionist physical science.
 
Doyle, along with Hayles, Kay and other cultural critics, holds the nascent discourses of coding and informatics responsible for stripping life of its natural body. Viewed as an external imposition-be it from physics, communications science, cybernetics, or computer science-information theory, for these critics, holds little respect for biological life. But what if an informatic discourse has always been inherent to genetic science? Moreover, what if nature or life has always been open to bioinformatic technology? The question not yet broached is whether the subindividual interactions made accessible via bioinformatics may in fact lead to the formulation of a different body and a different concept of (nonorganic) life. We may begin to approach this question, I suggest, by following Doyle in the connection he draws between informatics and onto-theology. Doyle characterizes George Gamow’s reconceptualization of the “coding problem” in terms of translation between the structure of DNA and the synthesis of proteins as “a technology that retools the depths of the body as a secret, even sacred archive” (40). I have noted above the connection between codes and secrecy, and that the response of genetic science has been to try and lay a secret bare. Doyle argues that, “Crucial to this project was the implicit notion that this ‘book of life,’ like its intertextual counterpart, the New Testament, offered one proper reading, one story, one Truth” (40). Again, the project of breaking the code of DNA and uncovering the mechanism of translation is, for Doyle, a reductionist gesture. He claims, “More than treating the molecular as the basis for the living, Gamow’s move translates the molecular as no different from the living” (42). This implies an ideal of translation without loss, which denies to living matter a reality of its own. According to Doyle, Gamow can make this move because he operates with a tacit belief that everything is readable. This is the “unthought thought” that ensures universal translation. All that is required is the key that unlocks the secrets of life and allows their legibility to be recognized. Natural order is presumed in an onto-theological move that Doyle, echoing Heidegger, describes as the coming of the “age of world scripture.”⁶
 
Kay also highlights the biblical associations evoked by the notion of reading the “Book of Life.” As she puts it, “this metaphor of transcendent writing acquired new, seemingly scientific legitimate meanings through the discourse of information” (2). The question is: is this a secular takeover, or a troubling return of that which had been supposedly banished? Certainly, the conceptualization of contemporary genomics as reading or decoding DNA fits easily into the tradition of deciphering the word of God as it appears in nature. What Doyle and Kay suggest is that this onto-theological tradition remains in effect today. Under conditions of universal translatability, the ideal message will always get through. The space that frames all such translation, however, remains unthought in this picture. With this in mind, I want to quote Doyle once more:
 

Even while the explicit aim of [Gamow’s] article, indeed of molecular biology generally, is to determine and articulate the fundamental chemical and physical mechanisms that make up the “secret” or “book” of life, it is the very allure of the “essence” of life that helps drive the investigation.
 

(56)

Beyond mere reductionism, it seems to me that Doyle is here giving voice to a key tension of molecular biology as a scientific project. If we follow molecular biology through to its avowed goal of controlling life, then does not the glow of victory dissolve along with its adversary’s? Without an onto-theological secret to reveal, molecular biology seems to feel that it is confronted with a more terrifying freedom, which is the same tension that I have identified as running throughout cyberscience. The uneasy juxtaposition of freedom, life, and code-script in Schrödinger, Wiener’s anxiety over the status of the human organism and community in a cybernetic world, and even the tension between entropy, meaning, and the very possibility of information in Shannon and Weaver’s theory of communication are all indicators of limits expressed in biological technoscience. My claim is that this tension, which revolves around the “secret” of life-of its authority, its reproduction, and of its revelation and control-is often implicitly played out through onto-theological discourses of (hetero)sexual difference.

 
Ultimately, the tension generated between an expanding informatic discourse in biology, which aims to control life at the subindividual level, and the concurrent desire to reaffirm the precedence of a meaningful organic body, which continually defers to the final authority of a natural order, is uneasily reconciled through discourses of (hetero)sexual difference that remain largely unexamined. The tensions that inhabit molecular biology in regard to the bioinformatic body are effectively displaced by a quasi-teleological, (hetero)sexual representation of matter and energy. Concepts of (hetero)sexual difference provide a resolution (however unstable) to the problem of the paradoxical freedom of nature by distributing the divergent desires for control of nature and a subordination to a divine or natural order into separate ontological dimensions of life, implicitly coded as masculine and feminine, respectively. While cyberscience marshals an informatic discourse that implicitly throws the meaning and stability of natural order into question, the resulting anxiety is repeatedly alleviated by the reaffirmation of (hetero)sexual difference, which functions to ensure the reproduction of order, authority, and the biological knowledge of nature.