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Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life ‘A wonderful work which, for the first time ever, balances an even handed weaving together of A-Life and cognitive science alongside evolutionary biology, cultural studies and feminist theory. Sarah Kember’s adroit mastery of such an astonishing range of sources is an incredible achievement – not least because she is equally at home with all of them and, importantly, has excellent powers of exposition to reach all of these audiences.’ Alison Adam, Salford University Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life examines the construction, manipulation and redefinition of life in contemporary technoscientific culture. The book takes a critical political view of the concept of life as information, and traces it through the new biology and the discourse of genomics incorporating the changing discipline of Artificial Life and its manifestation in art, language, literature, com- merce and entertainment. Using examples from cloning to computer games, and incorporating an analysis of hardware, software and ‘wetware’, Sarah Kember demonstrates how this relatively marginal field connects with – and connects up – global networks of information systems. Refocusing concern on the ethics, rather than the ‘nature’ of life-as-it-could-be, Kember proposes that Artificial Life is in part an adaptation to the climate of opposition surrounding Artificial Intelligence. From a feminist perspective, and with a set of concerns related to the role of the body, the self and the species in the production of life-as-it-could-be, Kember points to a strategy for change that rests on a dialogue between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, ontology and epistemology, science and the humanities. Sarah Kember is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media and Communica- tions at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Virtual Anxiety. Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity, 1998. Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life Sarah Kember First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2003 Sarah Kember All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-29915-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-16345-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-24026-3 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-24027-1 (pbk) Contents Preface vii Acknowledgements xi 1 Autonomy and artificiality in global networks 1 ALife in context, or, the ‘return to Darwin’ 2 Network bioethics 7 2 The meaning of life part 1: the new biology 14 Evolutionary biology – all about chickens and eggs 14 The metaphor of life as information 16 Biology as ideology – reductionism and determinism 19 Molecular biology – an endgame 23 Sociobiology and eugenics 31 Evolutionary psychology and the ‘Darwin Wars’ 40 3 Artificial Life 53 ‘Information Wants to be Alive!’ 60 The philosophy and biology of ALife 63 ALife’s autonomous agents 66 ALife’s non-vitalist vitalism 71 Spaces of dissent 71 The future of ALife – consolidating (digital) naturalism 78 4 CyberLife’s Creatures 83 SimWorlds – ALife and computer games 85 Stirring the primordial soup 85 The Creation part 1: making worlds 86 The Creation part 2: making life 88 Cain’s creation 89 Creatures 91 Playing the game 95 Creatures on the Internet 98 vi Contents CyberLife – selling ALife 105 CyberLife Research Limited – or ‘real’ ALife 109 5 Network identities 116 Artificial agents 116 HAL 116 Situated and autonomous robots 118 Bots 124 ALife aesthetics 127 Artificial cultures 133 Artificial societies 138 Artificial subjects 143 6 The meaning of life part 2: genomics 145 Artificial life as wetware 145 The species-self 150 Confessions of a justified sinner 150 The self as other 160 The other species 169 7 Evolving feminism in Alife environments 175 Alife-as-we-know-it 175 Natureculture 182 Risk 188 Pengi and the Expressivator 193 Alife-as-it-could-be 198 Autopoiesis and autonomy 198 Embodying Alife 204 Towards situating Alife 206 8 Beyond the science wars 211 Notes 217 Bibliography 227 Index 243 Preface This book aims to do two things: to trace the development of identities and entities within the global information network encompassing both human and non-human environments, and to offer a pluralised cyberfeminist engagement with artificial life as both a discipline and cultural discourse. As a cultural discourse, artificial life (alife) is more than a development of artificial intelligence (AI) which seeks similar goals by means of inverse methods and philosophies. As a cultural discourse, artificial life is both a descriptor of posthuman life-as-we- know-it and a predictor of posthuman life-as-it-could-be. The posthuman is cyborgian in the sense of its enmeshment, at all levels of materiality and metaphor, with information, communication and biotechnologies and with other non- human actors. The two terms are, however, not synonymous and while they describe a similar ontology (a hybridisation of organic and inorganic forms and processes) and epistemology (a transgression of the boundaries sustaining Modern Western thought, principally those of nature and culture), they do not necessarily share a politics, history or ethics. The discourse of artificial life is informed if not contained by a discipline which developed precisely at the end of the cold war and which rejected the militarist top-down command and control and the masculinist instrumental principles of AI. The cyborg which Donna Haraway (1991a) so astutely parodied in her manifesto was the product of cold war AI. Out of this comes a new discipline based on the principles of decentralised distributed control, bottom-up self-organisation and emergence. These are at once technical principles relating to the development of embodied intelligence and, obviously, socially and historically contingent political principles governing individuals and communities. The posthuman which I wish to explore here is a product of post-cold-war ALife and it has at its heart (or soul) a fundamental anti- instrumentalism. The posthuman which the discourse of artificial life both describes and prescribes is, to a large extent, posthumanised, and as such demands a bioethics of posthumanism which is yet to be articulated. Chris Hables Gray (2002) has outlined a cyborg bill of rights (an amendment of the US Consti- tution) in his suggestive exploration of cyborg citizenship. But where this is based on a model of human agency, the posthumanist bioethics which is sought here is emergent in the inter- or ‘intra-actions’ (Barad 2000) of network (id)entities or viii Preface artificial life-forms manifested in software (as computer programs), hardware (as robots) and wetware (as bio- and genetically engineered organisms). It is custo- mary, in the short history of debates on artificial life to restrict the analysis to forms of software and hardware and to the language and discourse which generates and is generated by these forms. This book breaks with that custom by emphasising the dual constitution of artificial life as both computer science and biology, and by highlighting the increasing hegemony of biological discourse within the discipline of ALife and within technoscientific culture generally (Haraway 2000). Embodied computer programs, situated autonomous robots and transgenic organisms co-exist within the global network as kin, sharing the ‘bodily fluids’ (Haraway 1997) or the life-blood of information. Moreover, these entities or beings are provisional, experimental, in the process of becoming. They can only indicate, but they do indicate some key parameters of posthuman identity. They are both beings in themselves and a means of working out what may be and who may be in the future. They are the literal manifestations and the creative imaginings of artificial life which is, by definition, at the boundary between nature and culture. To the distant gaze of cyberfeminism, artificial life seems to retreat from this precarious boundary position and engage in a form of renaturalisation by creating artificial entities in artificial worlds governed solely by Darwinian evolutionary principles. In the convergence between biology and computer science, it is the biology which speaks more loudly, and seems to speak more clearly to the feminist. From a distance, Artificial Life certainly looks like ‘sociobiology in computational clothing’ (Adam 1998) and Alison Adam was right to point out the dangers of a discourse which subsumes cultural into biological explanations of life. But the challenge for cyberfeminism – which, like other aspects of feminism, has had to interrogate its own relation to biological discourse through the problems of universalism and essentialism – is to recognise the plurality of positions which simultaneously undermine and strengthen not just its own case but that of its supposed adversary. There is no ‘biology’ any more than there is a homogenous ‘feminism’. What fails immediately on the recognition
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