(Posthuman) Technology

33 Technology Richard Iveson Introducing Extremes D ramatic technological innovations in the fields of genetic and genomic engineering are today producing sites and bodies of unforeseen indistinction that render untenable every distinction between ‘living’ beings and ‘non-living’ objects. As they inevitably emerge as arenas of intense political and ethical contestation, the urgency of the questions they raise calls for critical interrogation from all across the Humanities. These questions are particularly pressing for scholars of animal studies, however, as not only are they likely to set both the agenda and the limits of the field in the future, but also quite possibly determine whether ‘animal studies’ in fact even has a future, at least in its current incarnation. Here, it will be argued that innovative technologies provoke a very different kind of question for animal studies than is generally taken to be the case, one that reveals the entire field to be in need of radical reconfiguration. Key to this is a concern that perhaps produces more anxiety across the political and religious spectrums than any other: that technological innovation, in trespassing ever more explicitly upon the realm of the gods, ultimately promises only the collapse of civilisation itself. Examples of this anxiety can be found in the prevalence of technological dystopias and the recent resurrection to popular consciousness of the longdead zombie genre, as well as our increasing fascination with millenarian religious fundamentalisms of all kinds. At the heart of this is the fear that very soon it will no longer be possible to maintain a secure ontological division between living beings and technological artefacts – an operative distinction that serves as the foundation of our traditional discourses of morality and law. Indeed, it is the struggle of the moral few to endure amid surroundings of utter lawlessness and senseless destruction that typically drives narratives of imminent apocalypse and technological dystopia today.1 However, it will be argued here that all such polemics of fear are based upon a single fundamental error: the failure to understand that a secure distinction between living beings and non-living things never has existed and never will exist. Moreover, we must consequently reconsider our basic assumption that, when dealing with ‘mere’ objects, future effects can be unerringly predicted in the present on the basis of simple relations of cause and effect. For a number of reasons, extremophiles provide the key examples of the kinds of bodyings who occupy this indistinct zone at the intersection of life and matter. Consequently, to think with extremophiles is to radically resituate the place of ethics today and tomorrow. Moreover, to resituate the ethical domain in this way is necessarily to 5628_Turner.indd 504 16/10/17 6:02 PM technology 505 refuse to accommodate the innumerable atrocities being committed right now upon billions of ‘mere’ animals and, as such, opens an entirely new direction in animal studies bringing unforeseen possibilities of future engagement. In having shown themselves to be wildly unpredictable, extremophiles explicitly contest our habitual conceptions of nature and objecthood – the very same conceptions, as we shall see, which would otherwise serve to ground their own exploitation. Finally, I will argue, thinking with extremophiles shows how through the evolution of technology itself the priority of its own ethical dimension is ultimately revealed, as too is the central role played by technological artefacts in what amounts to nothing less than the collapse of all ethical programmes hitherto. Before any of that, however, let us briefly consider just who, or what, constitutes an extremophile. First discovered in the late-1970s, at its simplest the term ‘extremophile’ refers to any entity capable of thriving within an environment previously thought too extreme to support life – environments of extreme temperature or pressure, for example, or consisting of drastic concentrations of salt or toxic gases, or with high levels of atomic radiation, or environments that are strongly acidic or alkaline. Put more succinctly, however, ‘extremophile’ names the vast set of entities capable of synthesising self-protective extremolytes – a definition that reveals the apparent ‘extremeness’ of extremophiles as nothing more than an effect of anthropocentric perspective. Obtaining necessary nourishment from chemical gradients rather than sunlight and calorific food, extremophiles utterly transform our conceptions of life and being, and thus their importance for contemporary accounts of ontology, temporality, evolution and causality cannot be overstated.2 Not least, these miracles of survival bear almost limitless biotechnological potential within their coded forms of matter, promising any number of genetically based applications and processes that would bring huge medical, military and industrial profit in the future.3 Embodying a fundamental indiscipline, however, extremophiles also promise something very different: namely, a material promise to exceed all bounds of control. As such, not only are extremophiles both archetype and telos of the cyborg as identified by Donna Haraway in her hugely influential ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’,4 but they also serve as perfect placeholders for other non-human animals generally. In other words, while the following chapter is principally concerned with the evolution of technological artefacts into the future, this is by no means to assume that the situation today is therefore ethically acceptable. It is generally accepted that extremophiles are living beings. However, their ontological status is far less clear once they are displaced to the discipline of the laboratory and thus incorporated within the narrative that ‘Science’ constructs for itself. Moreover, this ontological uncertainty is further intensified by the fact that extremophiles today are largely being suborned as the material building blocks of a human future perceived beyond our biological truths. To this end, staggering sums of money and time are being spent on experiments aimed at the reverse bioengineering of extremophiles and their subsequent fabrication from whole cloth within the laboratory in the hope, among other things, of dissolving the various planetary restrictions that today somewhat hamstring the continuing expansion of capitalism.5 Paradoxically, however, these experiments can only ever be justified on the basis of an absolute distinction between ‘living’ beings and ‘non-living’ objects. In other words, the legitimacy that allows for the fabrication of just these technological entities 5628_Turner.indd 505 16/10/17 6:02 PM 506 richard iveson is founded upon contradictory premises: namely, that extremophiles are both singular forms of life and simple mechanisms indistinguishable from clockwork mice. Moreover, this inconsistency is absolutely necessary, insofar as it is only this fundamental contradiction that allows such experiments to conveniently sidestep the issue of ethics altogether. In other words, it is only insofar as extremophiles are objects, and therefore not ‘living’ entities, that scientists are able to assume that their acts of today can be unerringly predicted into the future in accordance with simple calculations of restricted cause and effect. The risk of experiments aimed at fully exploiting their potential value as singular forms of life can, in short, only ever be ethically justified on condition that extremophiles are simultaneously simple, lifeless mechanisms. As we shall see, what technological innovation in general – and extremophiles in particular – teach us is that it is only with the collapse of the simple distinction between ‘life’ and its absence that relations of unfettered instrumentalisation cease to be possible. Admittedly, this is somewhat counterintuitive. After all, common sense dictates that to be recognised as living, as a bona fide lifeform, serves as the best defence against basest forms of exploitation – one must not, after all, treat other living beings in the same instrumental fashion that defines our relations with mere objects. Things, however, are not that simple: relations of unfettered instrumentalisation are rather founded upon the exclusivity of perfect opposites: either this or that, but never both. Approaching Extremes . . . To fully grasp what is at stake in the habitual approach to technology today, it is necessary to begin with what many regard as the inaugural gesture of Western philosophy itself: Plato’s attempt to demarcate the domain of philosophy as proper to knowledge and thought.6 It soon becomes clear, however, that identification of such a domain is possible only on the basis that we already know exactly what it is that constitutes proper philosophical knowledge. In order to escape the trap posed by such circular logic, Plato abruptly shifts ground, attempting instead to fabricate the positive domain of philosophy on a foundation of its own negation, that is to say, through the prior exclusion of all that is not proper to knowledge until only the domain of philosophy remains. To this end, Plato begins with the exclusion of all such technical expertise common to the everyday sphere (tekhne) and ultimately ends up disposing the proper domain of philosophy to the immaterial realm of essential and atemporal truths.7 As a result, it is no longer thought possible to gain knowledge through existential experience, the coming into being over time characteristic of material existence having become, by definition, the absolute exclusion of proper philosophical knowledge. Shortly after this, Aristotle serves the ‘merely’ technical its second, almost fatal blow. First, he follows Plato by establishing the privilege of essential atemporal truths (episteme) over and against such ‘practical’ thinking suited to the everyday temporal world (tekhne) on the basis that only the former constitutes an end in itself, whereas the latter is merely the means for constituting such ends that exist outside of it.8 Second, in the complementary argument, Aristotle establishes the privilege of nature (physis) over and against fabricated objects (also tekhne), again on the basis 5628_Turner.indd 506 16/10/17 6:02 PM technology 507 that the efficient cause of the latter exists outside of themselves rather than as an immanent principle. Consequently, to be deemed tekhne is thus to be relegated to the status of a ‘mere’ tool existing entirely for human ends.9 Furthermore, taking the twin arguments together, Aristotle’s tekhne extends to the entirety of matter, and thus to being itself. Hence, what begins in the West as a simple, albeit somewhat ignominious desire to sidestep circular reasoning ultimately sets in train the mythic division of being itself into two mutually exclusive categories. On one side of the rift exist purposeful beings who are born, live and die, while on the other is lumped everything else, all the dumb, inanimate objects lacking any value or reason of their own. In this way, the technological becomes synonymous with the mechanical, and it is at this point that it first becomes possible to reductively reinterpret the world as nothing more than an external stockpile of matter awaiting its eventual instrumentalisation as a means for human ends – a picture of the world that has now held sway for millennia. While one might be forgiven for thinking that this particular world picture has presumably been superseded given the recent encroachment of technology into the once sacrosanct domain of the biological, the ultimate incorporation of what is currently called ‘life’ to within the vast stockpile of technologies awaiting instrumentalisation is simply one more step along the same path. To understand not only this, but also the central role played by notions of causality in the constitution of a newly inclusive domain of ethical concern, the post-Kehre works of Martin Heidegger remain indispensible. According to Heidegger, the picture of the world as a stockpile carries with a particular modus operandi or ‘mode of revealing’ that he calls ‘setting-upon’. This serves to reduce the ‘external’ world to an undifferentiated mass in which any composite part is indistinguishable from any other. As a consequence, it is the potential value for commodification, or absence thereof, of a given entity that ultimately determines whether it is to be counted as a purposeful being, and thus deserving of ethical concern, or merely an object and as such prohibited by definition from making any such claim whatsoever. While we will return to this in the conclusion, most important at this stage is that we do not confuse the ‘setting-upon’ process that renders every individual indistinguishable and thus exchangeable with the positive collapse of ontological difference disclosed by the resolute indistinction of extremophiles. Encroaching Extremes . . . As living beings and biological artefacts as well as fossils, technologies and machines, extremophiles, more than anything currently imaginable, break down the livingnon-living dichotomy. Consumers, engineers, producers and reproducers: they are at once the repository of a billion years of evolution and of a genomic code that, if unlocked, promises to reconfigure the world and all of its inhabitants in ways that defy imagination. Last but by no means least, extremophiles enable us see just what, exactly, remains of ethical choice today by exploding the myth of linear causality as fully determining in the case of any entity classified as an inanimate object by human animals, 5628_Turner.indd 507 16/10/17 6:02 PM 508 richard iveson obliging us instead to recognise that the future effects of inanimate causes too can never be predicted with absolute surety. Ironically, however, this latter is also what makes extremophiles so very valuable to the future of bioengineering and, indeed, of technology in general. It is also the reason why technological evolution itself must ultimately disallow its own continuance on the basis of a traditional separation of natural beings and technological artefacts and, in so doing, disclose ethical concern as a formative condition of its being. At the heart of this is the extremophile’s extraordinary ability to synthesise extremolytes in such a way as to protect its macromolecules and cells from external damage.10 This has resulted in extremophiles frequently being represented within scientific discourse as embodying nothing else but a promise of human protection and perfection in perfect two-step with patentable future technologies.11 Extremophiles, in other words, cease being extraordinary forms of life and become instead the promise of a new sunblock capable of protecting our future human bodies against UV damage or a newly patented fibre offering protection from radiation and even blast damage. More spectacular still, they become the promise of a future in which trademarked technologies safeguard our previously finite human bodyings from the damage of time itself. In other words, with the revelation that immortality is not uncommon among extremophiles, their hugely diverse ways of existence are entirely subsumed by the chance to conquer death itself, and thus render practically immortal all those human animals wealthy enough to pay the cost of purchase. In potentially harbouring within themselves the twin grails of both ‘more life’ and ‘more death’, it is hardly surprising to find immense sums of time and money currently being wagered in the hope of countering the various diseases and disorders that befall human beings as a result of harsh environments. In this, extremophiles all too clearly also embody the potential for astronomical profits – in military as much as economic terms. So, whereas extremophiles evolved their coveted abilities over countless eons, technoscience is now hard at work attempting to fabricate extremophiles from whole cloth. Irrespective of when or if such attempts succeed, this task already raises the absolute breakdown of traditional distinctions between life and nonlife to a further, dizzying degree. According to the traditional concept of ‘life’, the notion of fabricating life in the laboratory is pure fiction, the stuff of gothic horror and fantasy SF. In our post-extremophile universe, however, the possibility is all too real. At the very least, laboratory-engineered extremophiles promise to radically rewrite not only what it means to be ‘human’ or even what it means to be ‘living’, but rather what it means to be biological. As evolved form of life and technological fabrication, the bioengineered extremophile heralds a future of extraordinary, unforeseeable transformation – human into superhuman, perhaps, or else into something no longer human, and perhaps not even living if we still suppose that life presupposes death. What is clear, however, is that the question of ethics too must be radically resituated. Today, who or what the extremophile is, and who or what he or she or it or they might become, remains up for dispute. At stake here are the fundamental philosophical concepts of beinghood and thinghood, of subject and object. As such, we should not be surprised to see these questions increasingly becoming the site of intense ontological, social, economic, political and ethical dispute. And, as the very matter of 5628_Turner.indd 508 16/10/17 6:02 PM technology 509 foundational collapse, what is being contested through these sites and these bodies is just how the future will play out – a battle that inevitably comes down to the demolition or restoration of human in the future. Emerging . . . In order to fully grasp the promise of extremophiles, and thus possible futures of technological innovation, we must begin once again, this time with the purported ‘origin’ of life. According to scholars of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics (NET), a newly emerged subfield of thermodynamics generally, the discovery of extremophiles transforms the story of life. Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan, for example, argue that life can be traced to the energy flows of an energetic universe. . . . Deep in the chemical cycles of present-day bacteria are metabolic pathways, chemical traces repeating, with variation, the steps by which matter came to life. . . . Recent discoveries of deep-sea ecosystems feeding not on light or food but on chemical energy suggest an origin of life, paradoxically but poetically, in fire and brimstone.12 Key here is the notion of life originating in the repetition with variation of chemical traces, building on the notion that the reproduction of all living entities – and only living entities – depend for their ongoing species survival upon the chance of mutation, that is, upon a process of repetition-with-variation, or reiteration – one that, if successful, brings about accelerating feedback loops and, if not, ends in the decomposition or ‘death’ of the entity entirely in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Hence, in accordance with the thesis that life ‘originates’ in the reiteration of traces, Schneider and Sagan suggest that the innovation of life in the form of extremophiles is a consequence of them having ‘probably evolved’ into ‘the earliest natural copying machines’.13 This point is absolutely crucial: life, before it is anything else, is a copying machine, a technological artefact that, having adapted through reiterated mutations in order to record and reiterate patterns and codes, has evolved (Schneider and Sagan’s word) the capacity to reproduce. Indeed, Schneider and Sagan insist on this point: ‘Life’, they write, ‘must be regarded, at the deepest level, as a matter as much of energy transformation as of genetic replication.’14 At the most fundamental level, then, ‘life’ is a machine defined by ‘the calculable programming of an automatic repetition’.15 All of this perfectly accords with an understanding of evolution as a process of reiteration at every level of complexity, with selection for mutation being necessarily nonlinear insofar as innovation depends upon strong mutual interactions (or feedback) between components. Fracturing Darwin’s original conception of evolution as a strictly linear affair resulting in the perfect manifestation of a single optimal design, this founding nonlinearity presupposes only what Manuel DeLanda terms ‘gradients of fitness’, wherein a gradient functions only so long as differences of fitness remain so as to fuel a selection process that favours the reiteration (repetition-with-variation) of one kind over another.16 But, as DeLanda insists, this is not only a matter of life. This point is critical. Gradients apply as much to ‘molecular replicators and their different capacities to produce copies of 5628_Turner.indd 509 16/10/17 6:02 PM 510 richard iveson themselves’ as they do to ‘the differential reproductive success of embodied organisms’.17 In other words, gradients – or energetic differences – organise everything from hurricanes to hiccups and hippos. Whether evolved or engineered, entities must similarly adapt in unpredictable fashion according to the pressures of selection gradients. As a result, rather than demonstrating the natural absence of any ethical dimension, this a priori unforeseeability of evolutionary processes is instead the mark of its absolute necessity. Furthermore, it will be argued in the next section, this must therefore be true of every technological process. Unpredictability or nonlinearity, in other words, constitutes the condition of possibility of material presencing, that is to say, of existing, of being. Or, put in somewhat axiomatic form: Beings can only be by being other than what they are. Despite the difficulty of the logical and linguistic contortions involved, it is imperative that we understand exactly what is at stake here – a task of ever-increasing urgency given just how much is routinely being wagered today on the basis of a misplaced faith in the reliability and accuracy of projections into the future. Before we can do so, however, it still remains to engage in some depth with what philosopher Jacques Derrida calls the ‘structure of nonpresence’18 or, more simply, the trace – the importance of which cannot be overstated. Philosophising . . . Schneider and Sagan’s relocation of the origin of life to coincide with the emergence into being of extremophiles is, as we shall see, a copying machine of a very different order – of Aristotle, of Kant and of Derrida above all. Put as schematically as possible, Derrida argues that the becoming-time of space or the becoming-space of time represents the originary synthesis of the trace understood as the double movement of protention and retention.19 Most importantly, the structural unity of the trace demonstrates that an indivisible presence – that is, an entity fully present in and of itself – can never in fact be. Rather, for an entity to appear on the ‘scene of presence’, it must already keep within itself ‘the mark of the past element’ while at the same time letting itself ‘be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element’.20 For an entity to endure in time and thus appear as present, in other words, it is required as a prior condition of this appearing to bear the traces of both its past and its future. As a result, the appearance of anything deemed to be present, deemed to be, is shown rather to depend a priori upon its relation ‘to what it absolutely is not’ in that, in order for the present to be itself, an interval or spacing must already separate the present from what it is not.21 Furthermore, given this prior dependence upon what it absolutely is not, any instant of the now, of the present, can only appear by disappearing, and thus can only be inscribed as a trace. Hence, this means that every trace is necessarily spatial – what Derrida describes as the becoming-space-of-time – insofar as spatiality is defined by the ability to remain in place despite temporal succession. For an entity to endure, in other words, it must be spatial, must take place. At the same time, however, spatiality can never be absolute simultaneity, as the very concept of simultaneity depends upon a temporalisation that links one point in space to another, meaning that spacing is also a becoming-time, without which there could be no trace in the first place. As such, the 5628_Turner.indd 510 16/10/17 6:02 PM technology 511 structural logic of the trace is, by definition, constitutive of everything temporal, that is, of each and every entity that, living or not, endures and thus exists, however briefly, as a present being.22 Strangely, however, in Of Grammatology Derrida argues instead that the ‘emergence’ of the trace is synonymous with the emergence of life.23 As such, Derrida is suggesting that, yes, in fact, there is an identifiable origin to be found here, the event in question presumably having taken place at a specific and seemingly locatable moment in time – indeed, the precise historical moment in which, thereafter and forever, the originary technicity of the living being emerged into being.24 Ultimately, in insisting upon a determinable origin of life, Derrida – as, extremophiles notwithstanding, Schneider and Sagan will do so after him – bases his project on an unquestioned and unfounded faith that to live is to be exceptional, that is, to be absolutely ontologically distinct from all such entities deemed merely to endure until they do not. As a result, Derrida is already condemned to repeat the inaugural gesture of philosophy even before he begins: constituting an allegedly ‘proper’ domain of life entirely negatively by way of the exclusion of the non-living. In fact, all such claims as to a determinable origin of life are founded upon two irreconcilable premises that ultimately show them to be nothing more than productions of zoocentric bias: (1) Life emerges as a distinct ontological category, and (2) Life is dependent upon machinic repetition. On one hand, the first living being must be ontologically distinct from every previously existing being – meaning that the genesis of life is a creative event that, by definition, could not have been predicted on the basis of linear causality. Hence, life as invention, as creation, is necessarily nonlinear. On the other hand, however, the ‘first’ living being can only ever be one more replication of what already is. As such, every attempt at distinction relies upon a completely arbitrary stopping point in what is in fact a ceaseless process of reiteration that both precedes and succeeds any notional location of ‘origin’. Life, therefore, merely reproduces nonlife: continuum rather than difference. Insofar as the trace structure constitutes the general possibility of any entity actually being (whether that be a thing, body, artefact, idea or whatever), however, this is also to inscribe chance as a constitutive possibility of that entity’s being. The trace, if it is to trace anything at all, is the movement of past and future, the moment of retention and protention. As such, rather than determining the origin of life, the generalising of the trace is also the generalising of futural causality, inscribing nonlinearity as an a priori condition of each and every formed being. Any thing that exists, in other words, does so as the possibility of both machinic repetition and creative event. It is only this clear understanding of the trace that enables us to leave behind spurious theological fantasies of exceptionalism on the one hand, and an equally obnoxious reduction of life to nonlife on the other. Hence, while a generalising of the trace demands the concomitant deconstruction of the living-non-living binary for reasons of logic, it is equally important to recognise that the deconstruction of the living-nonliving binary simultaneously demands an extension of the trace structure, albeit for reasons of ethical imperative. Only by deconstructing the lines of exclusion that keep living from non-living, biology from artifice and being from object does instrumentalisation cease to be possible. As such, it is central to any accounting of who, or what, will ‘count’, ethically and politically, as a posthuman being in the future. While the 5628_Turner.indd 511 16/10/17 6:02 PM 512 richard iveson trace necessarily structures all forms of being, for us today, it is extremophiles who embody this structure most explicitly. Mutating . . . All of that is, however, for the future. For the moment, the focus of technoscience is ostensibly taken up with possible experiments aimed at the bioengineering of very specific mutations with the capacity to dissolve – quite literally – the various actual and imminent ecological crises that are today imposing limits on global capitalism’s operative principle: expansion. Extremophiles, in other words, serve today as the building blocks from which entities with a single purpose are be constructed: that of being able to thrive upon a diet of industrial pollutants ranging from nuclear waste, oil spills, discarded plastics, contaminants in the water table, and the vast lagoons of faeces expelled from the enormous, windowless blocks that are factory farms and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). After all, as the story goes, what point in living forever if the world is to perish any minute? Not by chance, however, this prioritising of environmental concerns serves also to reassure an anxious public. For a significant percentage of the global population, contemporary research into genetic and genomic modification continues to be a cause of intense anxiety. Unsurprisingly, this anxiety focuses almost exclusively upon the threat to the future of unforeseen gene actions coming to alter metabolism and brain function in ways that for many would be indistinguishable with the end of our world. However, the issue facing us today is in fact far more commonplace and extensive: a major consequence of the deconstruction of the living/non-living binary is the impossibility of all future prediction. Every present configuration of particles, in other words, is also the possibility of wildly unpredictable reiterations in the future. Even a single gene alteration targeting weight loss, for example, must inevitably affect a number of other interrelated pathway genes, and this pattern follows for even the most minor technology and seemingly mundane object. It comes as no surprise, then, to find extremophiles being mined first of all in respect to possible applications of microbial metabolic potential. Known as bioremediation, this process is far less contentious than the engineering of human enhancement, for example, and is widely accepted as being an ‘environmentally benign economic measure’.25 Despite this consensus, however, this construction in the media of bioremediation as ‘natural’, and so environmentally benign, is once again nothing more than sophistic rhetoric, mere means to an end in the form of a further ‘trick argument’ constructed upon three largely unrelated and contradictory assumptions: • Remediation and bioremediation technologies are more or less the same. • A secure ontological border exists between living and non-living beings. • The universe is wholly deterministic. In contrast to bioremediation technologies, remediation is a process that utilises alreadyexisting chemicals in order to disperse or dissolve pollutants in the environment, such as introducing the compounds alkylphenol or 2-butoxyethanol into oil spills. Considered an entirely ‘natural’ – i.e. environmentally sensitive – process, remediation technologies 5628_Turner.indd 512 16/10/17 6:02 PM technology 513 are therefore deemed as being without any ethical dimension whatsoever. From there, it is only a short step to the introduction of bioremediation technologies as being ‘practically’ the same and, hence, equally ‘natural’ (although with ‘natural’ here undergoing an unmarked but nonetheless significant shift of meaning) – technologies such as Oil Spill Eater II (OSE II), for example.26 A biological multi-enzyme introduced into the ocean, OSE II converts spilled oil into a food source for bacteria that are described in its promotional literature as ‘native’, but which are in fact populations of indigenous bacteria that have previously undergone ‘suitable enhancement’. Despite this, OSE II and other bioremediation technologies are generally perceived as being very similar to remediation processes, and it is by way of this assumed identity that bioremediation is deemed as similarly lacking in ethical dimension. Looking deeper, however, it quickly becomes clear that the apparent ‘naturalness’ of bioremediation and remediation processes is itself founded upon the traditional living-non-living dichotomy – the very opposition that the shift from chemistry to biology or from alkylphenol to Oil Spill Eater II in fact renders untenable. Put another way, alkylphenol and 2-butoxyethanol are, first of all, excluded from ethical consideration on the basis of being only things, that is, by virtue of being nonliving ‘objects’ and thus merely the means to human ends. Second, insofar as they are objects, it is assumed that their future effects can be unerringly predicted according to simple calculations of restricted cause and effect. But what happens once the separation between living being and non-living object breaks down? The idea of introducing living beings into scenes of environmental crisis, by contrast, has long been condemned in ethical terms due to the utter unpredictability of its effects – in this regard, one need only recall the introduction of cane toads into Australia from Hawaii.27 So, alkylphenol and 2-butoxyethanol are perceived as ‘natural’ and thus benign – i.e., safe and reliable – environmental supplements only because they are merely ‘things’ as it is only on this basis are they judged entirely predictable and thus safely controllable into the future. In contradistinction to living beings, the future interactions of mere objects are deemed fully determined by simple causality and thus fully accountable. The key selling point of bioremediation technologies, then, concerns the introduction of what are, according to its own classification, natural living entities. Concurrent with this, however, bioremediation technologies must also reduce these living beings to base matter, must allot them the ontological standing of objects and no more, in order to justify their exemption from issues of ethical concern. Given this, it is incumbent upon the promoters of bioremediation, as it is too upon those of remediation, to bolster faith in a secure living-non-living dichotomy. This, however, serves only to maintain a dangerous delusion: that a baseless attribution of objecthood can serve as a guarantee of future safety. Concluding . . . Après le deluge In the end, following millennia of trick arguments, we are returned to extremophiles. Beyond the illusions of vitalism, beyond delusions of safety constructed upon the politics of exclusion alone, unpredictability is disclosed as the structure of being itself. Furthermore, as a consequence of this nonlinearity of being, it is therefore impossible, by definition, to predict the emergence of a novel existent in the future, be that a new form of being or a technological innovation. Obviously, this renders massively 5628_Turner.indd 513 16/10/17 6:02 PM 514 richard iveson problematic any decisions made today on the basis of apparently reliable and accurate predictions as to the future. Rather, this oxymoronic notion of ‘accurate prediction’ is only ever possible on the basis of an ordered deterministic universe. It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that definitive of any such universe is the fact of its being without a future insofar as its future has already been contained and prescribed by its past. Of course, this is not to say that the ‘hard’ sciences generally, and technoscience in particular, are unaware of the immense risks currently being run should prediction itself prove to be wildly unreliable. Indeed, warnings to that effect proliferate exponentially whenever concerns are raised about extremophiles, bioremediation and biotechnology more generally. More specifically, it is widely recognised that since genetically engineered organisms lack the relative stability that comes from the evolution of genetic patterns, one requires, first of all and above all, a fully reliable prediction regarding future recombinative events. The problem, however, remains the same insofar as the solution is always preconceived as a need for increased reliability, and thus for a complete knowledge of the present context in terms of a synchronous cross-section of networked cause-and-effect. Ultimately, what today’s scientific rationality fails to recognise is that the very notion of reliable prediction, like that of a deterministic universe that founds it, is nothing but a myth – a failure of recognition that, if there are to be futures beyond imagining, needs to be urgently redressed. As specialists in science policy and risk communication Michael Tyshenko and William Leiss acknowledge, scientific researchers remain largely ‘unconcerned with the gap between things that “can be done” and “will be done,” placing science innovation as a technical exercise apart from any ethical concerns’.28 This lack of concern is simply unacceptable, however, once scientific determinism no longer holds. Since Aristotle, as we have seen, living beings have been considered ontologically distinct from fabricated artefacts by virtue of their being natural. It is unsurprising, then, that a certain concept of ‘nature’ still underwrites the instrumental approach to ‘simple’ objects. One that, by continuing to ensure the exclusion of ‘technical exercises’ from the realms of ethical concern in the process, clears the ground for just such an unheeding saturnalia of headlong technological acceleration as we have witnessed in recent decades. First of all, the absence of a perceived ethical dimension in relation to the ‘exercise’ of technoscientific knowledge depends upon the ‘fundamental notion that the world of nature is essentially a field in which human ingenuity can be exercised without restriction’.29 In this view, the ‘world of nature’ is reduced to an external realm of ‘things’ that exists entirely for-us, that is to say, everything that exists ‘naturally’, i.e., every non-human living being, exists only as a means to human ends. Such a reductive conception of nature inevitably results in a wildly skewed vision of the world, with the Earth itself reconfigured as an enormous storage facility stocked with ready-to-hand instruments to be used as fit by humanity alone. Under the sway of this world picture, it matters not at all in terms of their usefulness as means if a given instrument is ‘natural’ or fabricated, if it is physis or tekhne, that is, possesses or does not possess within itself its own effective principle. Nonetheless, it is exactly this distinction that serves as its ‘ground’. It is exactly this distinction that, beneath layers of obfuscation, continues to function today solely as a means to human ends. As previously mentioned, the later work of Heidegger is crucial. Modern science, he argues, first constructed the fundamental relationship of humanity to the world as a ‘standing reserve’ [Bestand] 5628_Turner.indd 514 16/10/17 6:02 PM technology 515 in this fashion, and did so through the entrapment of nature ‘as a coherence of forces calculable in advance’.30 As the herald of today’s ‘ordering attitude’ [Ge-stell], the mass of technological artefacts are never simply tools, however, never merely the means to ends that lay outside of themselves. Rather, continues Heidegger, these entities are themselves constitutive of a ‘mode of revealing’.31 Moreover, the particular mode of revealing that rules contemporary technoscience is that of a ‘setting-upon’, which first challenges nature to unlock its concealed energy, only to then reorder all of nature’s secrets in a global ‘standing reserve’ that will thereafter be forever transformed, stored, distributed and regulated in a ceaseless circle of revealing. In this process, every part becomes indistinguishable from every other part and the whole becomes the undifferentiated order that humanity decrees makes up its outside. It is, however, in the face of this ordering attitude definitive of global capitalism that we must reiterate ever more urgently what for Heidegger is the grounding question in this matter: namely, what happens if, just for a moment, we suppose that causality is rather ‘veiled in darkness with respect to what it is’?32 While the unprecedented ways of extremophiles disclose the universe as an incalculable, incoherent continuum of being, the sway of Ge-stell has nonetheless already ordered their transformation into everything else and nothing else: mere ‘stock’ awaiting economic viability. Hence it is not without a certain irony that, in occupying a site of extreme anxiety in regards to our global future, it can be hoped that these unprecedented miracles of our biotechnological survival might in fact bear within their coded forms of matter a very different promise: the end of a world reduced to a mere stockpiling of means to human ends. And here too resides the promise of animal studies: namely, the chance of a future that can only take place beyond the narrow constraints constitutive of human imagination. Notes 1. See, for example, the hugely popular films 28 Days Later, dir. Danny Boyle (UK: DNA films, 2002) and I Am Legend, dir. Francis Lawrence (USA: Warner Bros, 2007). The narrative of these is in clear contrast to the struggle to escape the confines of place characteristic of earlier examples of the genre such as The Dawn of the Dead, dir. George A. Romero (Italy: Dawn Associates, 1978) and The Evil Dead, dir. Sam Raimi (USA: Renaissance Pictures, 1981). 2. Largely because of their extraordinary physical appearance, the best-known examples of extremophiles today are the tardigrade and the blobfish. See Koki Horikoshi, Extremophiles: Where It All Began (Tokyo: Springer, 2016); Extremophiles: Microbiology and Biotechnology, ed. Roberto Paul Anitori (Norfolk: Caister Academic Press, 2012); and Extremophiles: Sustainable Resources and Biotechnological Implications, ed. Om V. Singh (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). For up-to-date developments, see Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). 3. Extremophiles have also been proven crucial to the development of bioengineering. A particularly well-known example is the so-called tag polymerase enzyme isolated from the extremophile Thermus aquaticus. This enzyme is fundamental to the procedures of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) procedure that has revolutionised biotechnology. Cf. Sonoko Ishino and Yoshizumi Ishino, ‘DNA Polymerases as Useful Reagents for Biotechnology – The History of Developmental Research in the Field’, Frontiers in Microbiology 5 (2014), p. 465. 5628_Turner.indd 515 16/10/17 6:02 PM 516 richard iveson 4. See Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 7–45. 5. For details of recent studies, along with just why this expenditure will almost certainly increase exponentially over the next decade, see Pabulo Rampelotto (ed.), Biotechnology of Extremophiles: Advances and Challenges (New York: Springer, 2016). 6. I am thinking primarily here of Meno and Phaedrus, particularly §80–7 and §244–50 respectively. See Plato, Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), pp. 870–97, 506–56. 7. The great irony here is that Plato in fact only appears to extricate knowledge, and therefore a proper philosophical domain, from the circularity of its own logic. Moreover, it is an appearance built not upon the eternal timelessness of truth, but rather fabricated through expert employment of learned techniques and practical skills. See Richard Iveson, Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounter with Animals (London: Pavement Books, 2014), pp. 33–6. 8. Nicomachean Ethics and Metaphysics in The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Modern Library, 2009), pp. 689–934, 935–1126. 9. Aristotle, Physics, pp. 218–397. Ibid. 10. Extremolytes, or organic osmolytes, are compounds accumulated in response to environmental pressures (such as increased temperature), as well as to increased solute extracellular concentrations (of salt, for example) in a process of equalisation known as osmosis, which thus protects biological macromolecules and cells from damage by external stresses. See G. Lentzen and T. Schwarz, ‘Extremolytes: Natural Compounds from Extremophiles for Versatile Applications’, Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology 72:4 (2006), pp. 623–634, and Maurice B. Burg and Joan D. Ferraris, ‘Intracellular Organic Osmolytes: Function and Regulation’, The Journal of Biological Chemistry 283:12 (2008), pp. 7309–13. 11. Despite their quality, the articles by Lentzen and Schwarz and Ishino and Ishino cited previously are nonetheless typical in this regard. 12. Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. xii–xiii. 13. Ibid. p. xii. 14. Ibid. p. xiii. 15. Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 71–160, p.72. 16. Manuel DeLanda, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 48. 17. Ibid. 18. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, 1997), p. 84. 19. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 13. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. The ontological underpinning of this position is detailed in my book, Being and Not Being: On Posthuman Temporality (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016). 23. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 84. 24. As to just why Derrida might equate the trace with ‘life in general’, see my ‘Being Without Life: On the Trace of Organic Chauvinism with Derrida and Delanda’, forthcoming in Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn (eds), Philosophy after Nature (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). 25. Romeela Mohee and Ackmez Mudhoo, ‘Elements of Sustainability and Bioremediation’, in Bioremediation and Sustainability: Research and Applications (Salem, MA: Scrivener Publishing, 2012), p. 5. 5628_Turner.indd 516 16/10/17 6:02 PM technology 517 26. British Petroleum tested the OSEI Corporation product Oil Spill Eater II at Louisiana State University in 2010–11. See <http://osei.us/pdf%20files/osei_sum.pdf> (accessed 28 August 2017). 27. Cane toads were introduced to Australia from Hawaii in 1935 in an attempt to control the native beetle populations and so safeguard sugar cane profits. Consequently, biodiversity became majorly depleted, with the ecological balance suffering a series of severe breakdowns. 28. Michael Tyshenko and William Leiss, ‘Life in the Fast Lane: An Introduction to Genomics Risks’, CTheory 2005, n.p., <http://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14534/5381> (accessed 28 August 2017). 29. Ibid. 30. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Perennial, 1977), p. 21. 31. Ibid. pp.12–13. 32. Ibid. p. 6. 5628_Turner.indd 517 16/10/17 6:02 PM