SOURCE: Shaviro, Steven. “Two Lessons from Burroughs.” In Posthuman Bodies, edited by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, pp. 38-54. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Shaviro explores Burroughs's place in the “landscape of postmodern biology.”]

Seattle, 1993. Don't believe the hype. I find myself stranded in this obsessively health-minded, puritanical, routinized, and relentlessly cheerful city, lifelines cut, lost without my vital supply of counteracting stimulants. Yes, some of the bands are still great, despite the insidious pressures of fame: Nirvana, Mudhoney, Seven-Year Bitch. But otherwise, nothing. I strain to hear the echo of Burroughs's silent scream: “What scared you all into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell you: the word.” But does anyone even remember? These prefabricated combinations of words, and these carefully crafted, HWP bodies, are all I can find, perhaps all there is. Organicism is a myth. Our bodies are never ourselves, our words and texts are never really our own. They aren't “us,” but the forces which crush us, the norms to which we have been subjected. It's a relief to realize that culture is after all empty, that its imposing edifices are sound stage facades, that bodies are extremely plastic, that facial expressions are masks, that words in fact have nothing to express. Bodies and words are nothing but exchange-value: commodities or money. All we can do is appropriate them, distort them, turn them against themselves. All we can do is borrow them and waste them: spend what we haven't earned and don't even possess. Such is my definition of postmodern culture, but it's also Citibank's definition of a healthy economy, Jacques Lacan's definition of love, and J. G. Ballard's vision of life in the postindustrial ruins. So don't be a good citizen. Don't produce, expend. Be a parasite. Live off your Visa card, or scavenge in the debris.

With all this in mind, I want to propose a biological approach to postmodernism. Ethology rather than ethnology. As we know from Foucault, from François Jacob, and from Donna Haraway, “biology” as we understand it today is a very recent invention. But of course it works both ways. Every mutation in culture is a new state of the body. Technological changes, as McLuhan said, are alterations in the very nature of our senses and of our nervous systems. The inventions that make, say, genetic engineering practicable are themselves biological innovations. The conditions of possibility for postmodernism first evolved something like one million years ago, with the appearance in our hominid ancestors of what might be called the Ronald Reagan gene or meme: the program for deceiving others more effectively by at the same time deluding yourself. This allows you to project a powerful aura of absolute sincerity. Pull the wool over your own eyes, as the Church of the SubGenius puts it. But the Reagan strategy is only one move in a long history of manipulations, power grabs, and scams. Freud and Lacan to the contrary, there's nothing less “essentialist,” less “organicist,” more political, and more historically variable than our “anatomy” or “biology.” I leave open for the moment the question of just how far this pronominal “our” extends.

Nobody understands these issues better than William Burroughs. All his major novels, from Naked Lunch (1959) to The Western Lands (1987), have explored the landscape of postmodern biology, with its deliriums and its terrors. That's why I invoke him as my guide in what follows. These “lessons” about language and about insects are only two of many to be learned from Burroughs. But a word of caution is in order. As we read in Nova Express: “And what does my program of total austerity and total resistance offer you? I offer you nothing. I am not a politician. … To speak is to lie—To live is to collaborate—There are degrees of lying collaboration and cowardice—It is precisely a question of regulation. …”

1. LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS

“Which came first, the intestine or the tapeworm?” In this epigram, William Burroughs suggests that parasitism—corruption, plagiarism, surplus appropriation—is in fact conterminous with life itself. The tapeworm doesn't simply happen to attach itself to an intestine that was getting along perfectly well without it. Say rather that the intestine evolved in the way that it did just in order to provide the tapeworm with a comfortable or profitable milieu, an environment in which it might thrive. My intestines are on as intimate terms with their tapeworms as they are with my mouth, my asshole, and my other organs; the relationship is as “intrinsic” and “organic” in the one case as it is in the other. Just like the tapeworm, I live off the surplus-value extracted from what passes through my stomach and intestines. Who's the parasite, then, and who's the host? The internal organs are parasitic upon one another; the organism as a whole is parasitic upon the world. My “innards” are really a hole going straight through my body; their contents—shit and tapeworm—remain forever outside of and apart from me, even as they exist at my very center. The tapeworm is more “me” than I am myself. My shit is my inner essence; yet I cannot assimilate it to myself, but find myself always compelled to give it away. (Hence Freud's equation of feces with money and gifts; and Artaud's sense of being robbed of his body and selfhood every time he took a shit.) Interiority means intrusion and colonization. Self-identity is ultimately a symptom of parasitic invasion, the expression within me of forces originating from outside.

And so it is with language. In Burroughs's famous dictum, language is a virus from outer space. Language is to the brain (and to the speaking mouth and the writing or typing hand) as the tapeworm is to the intestines. Or even more so: it may just be possible to find a digestive space free from parasitic infection (though this is extremely unlikely), but we will never find an uncontaminated mental space. Strands of alien DNA unfurl themselves in our brains, even as tapeworms unfurl themselves in our guts. Burroughs suggests that not just language, but “the whole quality of human consciousness, as expressed in male and female, is basically a virus mechanism.” This is not to claim, in the manner of Saussure and certain foolish poststructuralists, that all thought is linguistic, or that social reality is constituted solely through language. It is rather to deprivilege language—and thus to take apart the customary opposition between language and immediate intuition—by pointing out that nonlinguistic modes of thought (which obviously exist) are themselves also constituted by parasitic infiltration. Visual apprehension and the internal time sense, to take just two examples, are both radically nonlinguistic; but they too, in their own ways, are theaters of power and of surplus-value extraction. Light sears my eyeballs, leaves its traces violently incised on my retinas. Duration imposes its ungraspable rhythms, emptying me of my own thought. Viruses and parasitic worms are at work everywhere, multiple “outsides” colonizing our “insides.” There is no refuge of pure interiority, not even before language. Whoever we are, and wherever and however we search, “we are all tainted with viral origins.”

Burroughs's formulation is of course deliberately paradoxical, since viruses are never originary beings. They aren't self-sufficient, or even fully alive; they always need to commandeer the cells of an already-existing host in order to reproduce. A virus is nothing but DNA or RNA encased in a protective sheath; that is to say, it is a message—encoded in nucleic acid—whose only content is an order to repeat itself. When a living cell is invaded by a virus, it is compelled to obey this order. Here the medium really is the message: for the virus doesn't enunciate any command, so much as the virus is itself the command. It is a machine for reproduction, but without any external or referential content to be reproduced. A virus is thus a simulacrum: a copy for which there is no original, emptily duplicating itself to infinity. It doesn't represent anything, and it doesn't have to refer back to any standard measure or first instance, because it already contains all the information—and only the information—needed for its own further replication. Marx's famous description of capital applies perfectly to viruses: “dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

Reproduction (sexual or otherwise) is often sentimentally considered to be the basic activity and fundamental characteristic of life. But it is arguably more a viral than a vital process. Reproduction is so far from being straightforwardly “organic,” that it necessarily involves vampirism, parasitism, and cancerous simulation. We are all tainted with viral origins, because life itself is commanded and impelled by something alien to life. The life possessed by a cell, and all the more so by a multicellular organism, is finally only its ability to carry out the orders transmitted to it by DNA and RNA. It scarcely matters whether these orders originate from a virus, or from what we conceive as the cell's own nucleus. For this distinction is only a matter of practical convenience. It is impossible actually to isolate the organism in a state before it has been infiltrated by viruses, or altered by mutations; we cannot separate out the different segments of DNA, and determine which are intrinsic to the organism and which are foreign. Our cells' own DNA is perhaps best regarded as a viral intruder that has so successfully and over so long a stretch of time managed to insinuate itself within us, that we have forgotten its alien origin. Our genes' “purposes” are not ours. As Richard Dawkins puts it, our bodies and minds are “survival machines” programmed for replicating genes, “gigantic lumbering robots” created for the sole purpose of transmitting DNA. Burroughs describes language (or sexuality, or any form of consciousness) as “the human virus.” All our mechanisms of reproduction follow the viral logic according to which life produces death, and death in turn lives off life. And so remember this the next time you gush over a cute infant. “Cry of newborn baby gurgles into death rattle and the crystal skull,” Burroughs writes, “THAT IS WHAT YOU GET FOR FUCKING.”

Language is one of these mechanisms of reproduction. Its purpose is not to indicate or communicate any particular content, but merely to perpetuate and replicate itself. The problem with most versions of communications theory is that they ignore this function, and naively present language as a means of transmitting information. Yet language, like a virus or like capital, is in itself entirely vacuous: its supposed content is only a contingent means (the host cell or the particular commodity form) that it parasitically appropriates for the end of self-valorization and self-proliferation. Apart from the medium, there's no other message. But if language cannot be apprehended in terms of informational content, still less can it be understood on the basis of its form or structure, in the manner of Saussure, Chomsky, and their followers. These theorists make an equivalent, but symmetrically opposite, error to that of communications theory. They substitute inner coherence for outer correspondence, differential articulation for communicative redundancy, and self-reference for external reference; but by isolating language's self-relational structure or transformational logic, they continue to neglect the concrete and pragmatic effects of its violent replicating force. Both communicational and structural approaches try to define what language is, instead of looking at what it does. They both fail to come to grips with what J. L. Austin calls the performative aspect of linguistic utterance: the sense in which speaking and writing are actions, ways of doing something, and not merely ways of (con)stating or referring to something. (Of course, stating and referring are in the last analysis themselves actions.) Language does not represent the world: it intervenes in the world, invades the world, appropriates the world. The supposed postmodern “disappearance of the referent” in fact testifies to the success of this invasion. It's not that language doesn't refer to anything real, but—to the contrary—that language itself has become increasingly real. Far from referring only to itself, language is powerfully intertwined with all the other aspects of contemporary social reality. It is a virus that has all too fully incorporated itself into the everyday life of its hosts.

A virus has no morals, as Rosa von Praunheim puts it, talking about HIV; and similarly the language virus has no meanings. Even saying that language is performative doesn't go far enough; for it leaves aside the further question of what sort of act is being performed, and just who is performing it. It is not “I” who speaks, but the virus inside me. And this virus/speech is not a freestanding action, but a motivated and directed one: a command. Morse Peckham, Deleuze and Guattari, and Wittgenstein all suggest that language is less performative than it is imperative or prescriptive: to speak is to give orders. To understand language and speech is then to acknowledge these orders: to obey them or resist them, but to react to them in some way. An alien force has taken hold of me, and I cannot not respond. Our bodies similarly respond with symptoms to infection, or to the orders of viral DNA and RNA. As Burroughs reminds us: “the symptoms of a virus are the attempts of the body to deal with the virus attack. By their symptoms you shall know them. … If a virus produces no symptoms, then we have no way of knowing that it exists.” And so with all linguistic utterances: I interpret a statement by reacting to it, which is to say by generating a symptom. Voices continually call and respond, invoke and provoke other voices. Speaking is thus in Foucault's sense an exercise of power: “it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of acting. A set of actions upon other actions.” Usually we obey orders that have been given us, viscerally and unreflectively; but even if we self-consciously refuse them, we are still operating under their constraint, or according to their dictation. Yet since an order is itself an action, and the only response to an action is another action, what Wittgenstein ironically calls the “gulf between an order and its execution” always remains. I can reply to a performance only with another performance; it's impossible to step outside the series of actions, to break the chain and isolate once and for all the “true” meaning of an utterance. The material force of the utterance compels me to respond, but no hermeneutics can guarantee or legislate the precise nature of my response. The only workable way to define “meaning” is therefore to say, with Peckham, that it is radically arbitrary, since “any response to an utterance is a meaning of that utterance.” Any response whatsoever. This accounts both for the fascistic, imperative nature of language, and for its infinite susceptibility to perversion and deviation. Strands of DNA replicate themselves ad infinitum. But in the course of these mindless repetitions, unexpected reactions spontaneously arise, alien viruses insinuate themselves into the DNA sequence, and radiation produces random mutations. It's much like what happens in the children's game “Telephone”: even when a sentence is repeated as exactly as possible, it tends to change radically over the course of time.

We all have parasites inhabiting our bodies; even as we are ourselves parasites feeding on larger structures. Call this a formula for demonic or vampiric possession. The great modernist project was to let the Being of Language shine forth, or some such grandiose notion. If the “I” was not the speaker, the modernists believed, this was because language itself spoke to me and through me. Heidegger is well aware that language consists in giving orders, but he odiously idealizes the whole process of command and obedience. We postmodernists know better. We must say, contrary to Heidegger and Lacan, that language never “speaks itself as language”: it's always some particular parasite, with its own interests and perspective, that's issuing the orders and collecting the profits. What distinguishes a virus or parasite is precisely that it has no proper relation to Being. It only inhabits somebody else's dwelling. Every discourse is an unwelcome guest that sponges off me, without paying its share of the rent. My body and home are always infested—whether by tapeworms and cockroaches, or by Martians and poltergeists. Language isn't the House of Being, but a fairground filled with hucksters and con artists. Think of Melville's Confidence Man; or Burroughs's innumerable petty operators, all pulling their scams. Michel Serres, in The Parasite, traces endless chains of appropriation and transfer, subtending all forms of communication. (He plays on the fact that in French the word parasite has the additional connotation of static, the noise on the line that interferes with or contaminates every message.) In this incessant commerce, there is no Being of Language. But there are always voices: voices and more voices, voices within and behind voices, voices interfering with or replacing or capturing other voices.

I hear these voices whenever I speak, whenever I write, or whenever I pick up the telephone. Marshall McLuhan argues that technological change literally produces alterations in the ratio of our senses. The media are artificially generated parasites, prosthetic organs, “the extensions of man.” Contemporary electronic telecommunications media are particularly radical, as they don't just amplify one sense organ or another, but represent an exteriorization of the entire human nervous system. Today we don't need shamans any longer, since modems and FAXes are enough to put us in contact with the world of vampires and demons, the world of the dead. Viruses rise to the surface, and appear not just in the depths of our bodies, but visibly scrawled across our computer and video screens. In William Gibson's Count Zero, the Haitian loas manifest themselves in cyberspace: spirits arising in the interstices of our collectively extended neurons, and demanding propitiation. In certain issues of the DC comic book Doom Patrol, written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Richard Case, we learn that the telephone is “a medium through which ghosts might communicate”; words spoken over the phone are “a conjuration, a summoning.” The dead are unable fully to depart from the electronic world. They leave their voices behind, resonating emptily after them. The buzzing or static that we hear on the telephone line is the sum of all the faint murmurings of the dead, blank voices of missed connections, echoing to infinity. These senseless utterances at once feed upon, and serve as the preconditions for, my own attempts to generate discourse. But such parasitic voices also easily become fodder for centralizing apparatuses of power, like the military's C³I system (command/control/communication/intelligence). Doom Patrol reveals that the Pentagon is really a pentagram, “a spirit trap, a lens to focus energy.” The “astral husks” of the dead are trapped in its depths, fed to the voracious Telephone Avatar, and put to work on the Ant Farm, “a machinery whose only purpose is to be its own sweet self.” As Burroughs also notes, the life-in-death of endless viral replication is at once the method and the aim of postmodern arrangements of power.

No moribund humanist ideologies will release us from this dilemma. Precisely by virute of their moribund status, calls to subjective agency, or to collective imagination and mobilization, merely reinforce the feedback loops of normalizing power. For it is only by regulating and punishing ourselves, internalizing the social functions of policing and control, that we ever arrive at the strange notion that we are producing our own proper language, speaking for ourselves. Burroughs instead proposes a stranger, more radical strategy: “As you know inoculation is the weapon of choice against virus and inoculation can only be effected through exposure.” For all good remedies are homeopathic. We need to perfect our own habits of parasitism, and ever more busily frequent the habitations of our dead, in the knowledge that every self-perpetuating and self-extending system ultimately encounters its own limits, its own parasites. Let us become dandies of garbage, and cultivate our own tapeworms, like Uncle Alexander in Michel Tournier's novel Gemini (Les Météores). Stylize, enhance, and accelerate the processes of viral replication: for thereby you will increase the probability of mutation. In Burroughs's vision: “The virus plagues empty whole continents. At the same time new species arise with the same rapidity since the temporal limits on growth have been removed. … The biologic bank is open.” It's now time to spend freely, to mortgage ourselves beyond our means.

Don't try to express “yourself,” then; learn rather to write from dictation, and to speak rapturously in tongues. An author is not a sublime creator, as Dr. Frankenstein wanted to be. He or she is more what is called a channeller, or what Jack Spicer describes as a radio picking up messages from Mars, and what Jacques Derrida refers to as a sphincter. Everything in Burroughs's fiction is resolved into and out of a spinning asshole, which is also finally a cosmic black hole. In Chester Brown's comic book Ed the Happy Clown (originally Yummy Fur), there is a man who suffers from a bizarre compulsion: he can't stop shitting. More comes out than he could ever possibly have put in. It turns out that his asshole is a gateway to another dimension, a transfer point between worlds. This other dimension isn't much different from ours: it has its own hierarchies of money and power, its own ecological dilemmas, even its own Ronald Reagan. But what's important is the process of transmission, and not the nature of the product. Waste is the only wealth, and that's how masterpieces are born. “Why linger over books to which the author has not been palpably constrained?” (Bataille). This constraint, this pressure in my intestines and bowels, marks the approach of the radically Other. It's in such terms, perhaps, that we can best respond to George Clinton's exhortation: “Free your mind, and your ass will follow.”

2. THE INSECT PEOPLE OF MINRAUD

We all have our totem animals, our familiars, our spirit guides. They are usually other mammals, sometimes birds, occasionally even reptiles or amphibians; but they are almost always vertebrates of one sort or another. Our relationships with insects, on the other hand, tend to be stranger, more uncanny, more disturbing. Few of us—Spiderman aside—willingly accept intimacy with the arthropods. “Insect collecting is a hobby few can share,” as Shonen Knife gently laments. Burroughs waxes lyrical about cats, about lemurs, about “sables, raccoons, minks, otters, skunks and sand foxes”; but he can only approach arthropods with an obsessive, fascinated repulsion. His novels are filled with hallucinatory visions of the insect- and centipede-ridden realms of Minraud and Esmeraldas, places of sexual torture and sacrifice. Exceptions to this horror can perhaps be made for the beauty of butterflies, and for the savoriness of certain non-insect arthropods, like crustaceans. But almost nobody enjoys our enforced proximity to bedbugs, cockroaches, and houseflies. Is our disgust simply the result of being confronted with a life form so utterly alien? Our lineage separated from theirs more than 600 million years ago, even before the Cambrian explosion. The insects' modes of feeding and fucking, those two most crucial biological functions, are irretrievably different from ours. Looking across the vast evolutionary gap, we are seized by vertiginous shudders of gastronomical nausea and sexual hysteria:

We have all seen nature films in which enormously magnified insects unfeelingly dismember their prey. Their glittering multifaceted eyes stare at the camera while their complex mouthparts work busily, munching through still-struggling victims. We can empathize with our closer relatives the lions, who at least seem to enjoy their bloody work. But when the female mantis bites the head off its mate in order to release its copulatory reflex, it does so at the behest of an instinct that seems to have nothing to do with love, hate, or anything else to which we can remotely relate.

(Christopher Wills, The Wisdom of the Genes)

Such an enthralled disgust is crucial to the postmodern experience of limits. The narrator of Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G. H. is captivated by the sight of a wounded cockroach, trapped in a doorjamb as a “whitish and thick and slow” paste oozes out of its ruptured body. After pages of obsessive contemplation and description, she ritually devours the cockroach, finding in it the impossible “embodiment of a prehistoric, pre-symbolic, ecstatic primal divine matter” (Camillo Penna). But this effort at communion necessarily fails. The flesh of the squashed bug is sacred, as Bataille might put it, because it is primordially ambivalent: it arouses both disgust and desire, at once demanding and repelling our intimate contact. We cannot touch, much less eat, this debased matter; and yet we cannot stop ourselves from touching and eating it. Insect life is an alien presence that we can neither assimilate nor expel. Professional exterminators know this well, and so do the best theologians and philosophers. Much ink has been spilled recently exploring Thomas Nagel's question, “what is it like to be a bat?”—or more accurately: is it possible for us to know what it's like to be a bat? But the whole discussion looks suspiciously like a replay of the old philosophical canard regarding the alleged unknowability of “other minds,” only tricked out this time in postmodern drag. And in any case the bat is still a mammal, a fairly close relative of ours. That makes it all much too easy. Wouldn't it be more relevant and useful to pose the question of radical otherness in biological terms, instead of epistemological ones? It would then become a problem, not of metaphorically entering the mind of a bat, but of literally and physically entering—or metamorphosing into—the body of a housefly. And resolving such a problem would involve the transfer, not of minds, but of DNA. What's important is not to intuit what it might be like to be another species, but to discover experimentally how actually to become one. Such is the import of Cronenberg's film The Fly.

Burroughs cites Rule One of the basic biologic law, rigidly enforced by the Biologic Police: “Hybrids are permitted only between closely related species and then grudgingly, the hybrids produced being always sterile.” To innovate means to violate this law, to introduce alien genetic material, to assume the risks of “biologic and social chaos.” But then, viruses and bacteria are doing this all the time. There's nothing new about genetic engineering; as Lynn Margulis points out, humans are only now adopting techniques that prokaryotes have already been practicing for billions of years. As for viruses, they seem just to be transposable elements—such as can be found in any genome—which have revolted against the tyranny of the organism, or otherwise gotten out of hand. From meiosis to symbiotic merger, every genetic recombination is a new throw of the dice. No such process can be controlled or determined in advance. In Cronenberg's film, Homo sapiens meets Musca domestica only by the sheerest contingency. The transformation of Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) into an insect—or more precisely, into the monstrous hybrid Brundlefly—is a statistical aberration: an improbable accident, a fortuitous encounter, an irreproducible, singular event. That's why Seth never quite comprehends what's happening to him, at least not at the moment that it happens. His scientific consciousness lags perpetually behind his ceaselessly mutating body. His theories about his condition are out of date by the time he utters them. Cronenberg's human-turned-fly is the postmodern realization of Nietzsche's prophecy of the Overman: “man is something that should be overcome.” For the Ubermensch is not the “higher man,” nor is he any sort of fixed entity. Rather he is a perpetual becoming, an ungrounded projection into unknowable futurity. The singular hybrid Brundlefly is just such a body, without stable identity, caught in the throes of transformation. Did Nietzsche ever suspect that his great metaphysical longing would be most compellingly realized in insect form? Any scientist can make observations about how flies (or bats, or humans) act in general; but even Seth Brundle never knows from the inside “what it's like” to be a fly. For “what it's like” necessarily involves the irreversible othering of the knower: the “going-under” of the Overman, the continual “becoming” of Brundlefly. The pursuit of knowledge, as Foucault puts it, should result not just in the “acquisition of things known,” but above all in “the going-astray of the one who knows.”

Insects are well ahead of humans in this regard. Radical becomings take place routinely in their own lives. This is especially so in groups that pass through pupal metamorphosis. Their bodies are broken down and completely rebuilt in the course of transmutation from the larval to the mature stage. Is the butterfly “at one” with the caterpillar? Is this housefly buzzing around my head “the same” as the maggot it used to be? One genome, one continuously replenished body, one discretely bounded organism; and yet a radical discontinuity both of lived experience and of physical form. The surplus value accumulation of larval feeding gives way to lavish expenditure: the extravagant coloration of the butterflies, the coprophilic copulation of houseflies and others. Insect life cycles continually affirm the possibilities of radical difference—even if ants and bees would co-opt this difference into the homogenizing mold of the State. Every insect is a “singularity without identity,” in Giorgio Agamben's phrase. The fringe biologist Donald I. Williamson even goes so far as to argue that larval stages are remnants of symbiotic mergers between formerly independent organisms. But whether or not this be literally the case, Brundle's hybridization certainly opens the door to yet stranger metamorphoses. The body of an insect—far more radically than the mind of a dialectician—is perpetually “other than itself.”

The high intelligence and adaptive flexibility of mammals is usually attributed to our premature birth, and our consequent long period of growth outside the womb. Genetics is supplemented by empirical learning and parental guidance. We lay down numerous memory traces, and build up complex personalities. Learning doesn't play such a role in insect development: not only because they have too few neurons to store all that information, but more crucially because memory traces cannot survive intact through the vast physiological changes of pupal transmutation. We higher mammals like to congratulate ourselves on our supposed ability to alter our own behavior adaptively in the span of an single lifetime. But this complacency may well be exaggerated. Innovation is harder than it seems. Insects usually manage to adapt to changed environmental circumstances a lot faster than we do, thanks to their greater propensity to generate mutations, and their far higher rate of genetic recombination over the course of much shorter reproductive cycles. In humans and other mammals, once memory traces are forged and reinforced, it's nearly impossible to get rid of them. And as if that weren't enough, we've also instituted traditions and norms of critical reflection, the better to police our identities, and to prevent our minds and bodies from going astray. Education, after all, is just a subtler and more sadistically refined mode of operant conditioning than the one provided by direct genetic programming. As Elias Canetti remarks, no totalitarian despot can ever hope to dominate and control his subjects so utterly as human parents actually do their children. We accept such discipline largely because we feel compensated for it by the prospect of imposing it in turn upon our own descendants. Our mammalian talents for memory and self-reflection serve largely to oppress us with the dead weight of the past. Morse Peckham is right to insist that only “cultural vandalism”—the aggressive undermining of established values through random, mindless acts of destruction—can free us from this weight, and stimulate social innovation. We humans need to push ourselves to such disruptive extremes; otherwise we have no hope of matching the insects' astonishing ability to adaptively alter their physiology and behavior in a relatively brief time. Unburdened by mammalian scruples, insects effortlessly practice the Nietzschean virtue of active forgetting: the adult fly doesn't remember anything the maggot once knew.

Postmodern biology is increasingly oriented toward what might be called an insect paradigm. In postmodern biotechnology, according to Donna Haraway, “no objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.” The organicism of romantic and modernist thought—together with its political correlate, the disciplinary “biopolitics” so powerfully described by Foucault—has given way to a new model of life processes. Postmodern bodies are neither “vitalistic” nor “mechanistic.” They are structured through principles of modular interchangeability and serial repetition; they innovate, not on the basis of any pregiven criteria, but experimentally, by continual trials of natural selection. Arthropod body plans are especially postmodern, built as they are on multiply repeated segments, which can be fused or altered to generate new, differentiated structures. (The organic metaphors of the nineteenth century, in contrast, are idealizations of vertebrate body plans.) Genetic engineering, whether carried out in the laboratory or in “nature,” requires just such a modular flexibility. Stephen Jay Gould, reflecting on the astonishing variety of arthropod forms discovered in the fossils of the Burgess shale, suggests that the initial Cambrian diversification of multicellular life progressed precisely in this way. Cambrian evolution seems to have taken the form of a “grab bag,” mixing and matching body segments in a process much like “constructing a meal from a gigantic old-style Chinese menu: one from column A, two from B, with many columns and long lists in every column” (Wonderful Life). This kind of thing doesn't much happen in macroevolution any longer; but it's still crucial on the molecular-genetic level, as Christopher Wills argues in The Wisdom of the Genes. Certain mimetic butterflies, for instance, have linked “supergene complexes” that allow them alternatively to mimic any one of a number of vastly different model species. Segmented repetition with modular variation remains the basic organizing principle of all insect genomes: hence the frequency of homeotic mutations—multiplied wings and legs, antennae transformed into legs, added or subtracted segments—in laboratory strains of Drosophila. Melancholy old conservatives like Jean Baudrillard fear that postmodern modular coding leads to a preprogrammed “satellitization of the real,” and finally to its total “extermination.” But even the slightest acquaintance with insects will convince you that—contrary to Baudrillard's claims—“the hyperrealism of simulation” allows for a far greater explosion of change, multiplicity, and sheer exuberant waste than traditional organicist models of production and circulation ever did.

Haraway points out that recent developments in postmodern biology involve a radical problematization and “denaturalization” of all notions of the organism and the individual. Witness Lynn Margulis on the symbiotic basis of eukaryotic cells, Richard Dawkins on “selfish genes,” parasitism, and the “extended phenotype,” and Leo Buss on the multiple, variant cell lineages of mammalian immune systems. When we look at the molecular-genetic basis of life, all we can find are differences and singularities: multiple variations, competing alleles, aberrant particle distributions, unforeseeable sequence transpositions. These multiplicities never add up to anything like a distinct species identity. Postmodern biology thus deals not with fixed entities and types, but with recurring patterns and statistical changes in large populations—whether these be populations of genes or populations of organisms. It tends to emphasize anomalous phenomena like retroviral infections and horizontal gene transfers; in such encounters, alteration “ceases to be a hereditary filiative evolution, becoming communicative or contagious” (Deleuze and Guattari). Postmodern biology moves directly between singularities without identity and population multiplicities, without having recourse either to intervening, mediating terms, or to overarching structural orders. It rejects the “holism” formerly attributed both to the individual organism and to the larger ecosystem. Look at the mutations and transpositions haunting any genome, or observe the behavioral quirks of the cockroaches invading your apartment. You will find what Deleuze and Guattari call:

molecular, intensive multiplicities, composed of particles that do not divide without changing their nature, and distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications, as they cross over into each other at, beyond, or before a certain threshold.

(A Thousand Plateaus)

The obsolescence of those old organicist and holistic myths opens the way to strange new social and political arrangements. In our postmodern world, the “disciplinary power” analyzed by Foucault is continually being displaced into more subtly insidious modes of oppression. The ubiquitous codes of an “informatics of domination” (Haraway) are initially deployed by government bureaucracies, and then “privatized” as the property of multinational corporations. Such flexible and universal codes, insinuating themselves within all situations by a process of continual modulation, are the hallmark of what Deleuze, following Burroughs, calls the postmodern “society of control.” Cybernetic regulation is the human equivalent of the pheromone systems that regulate all activity in an ant colony. But let's not assume that this new arrangement of power forecloses all possibilities of resistance and change. As Deleuze says, “there's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” Seth Brundle speaks of his paradoxical desire to become “the first insect politician,” suggesting the possibility of an alternative insect politics, different from the totalitarianism of ants and bees. Consider that flies, like midges and mosquitoes, tend to swarm; and that locusts periodically change form, and launch forth into mass nomadic rampages. Such insects form immense crowds without adopting rigidly hierarchical structures. Their loose aggregations offer far more attractive prospects for postmodern sociality than do the State organizations of the Hymenoptera. Insect swarms are populations in continual flux, distributing themselves randomly across a vast territory. They are altered by the very processes that bring them together, so that they can neither be isolated into separate units, nor be conjoined into a higher unity. “Their relations are distances; their movements are Brownian; their quantities are intensities, differences in intensity” (Deleuze and Guattari). If postmodern power is exemplified by the informational feedback mechanisms of the “insect societies,” then maybe a postmodern practice of freedom can be discovered in the uncanny experience of the insect swarms. The next time you see flies swirling over a piece of dung, reflect upon what Agamben calls the “coming community,” one that is not grounded in identity, and “not mediated by any condition of belonging”; or upon what Blanchot calls “the unavowable community” or “the negative community” or (quoting Bataille) “the community of those who do not have a community.”

Postmodern politics, like postmodern biology, must in any case come to grips with natural selection. The romantics and the modernists alike misconceived evolution in melioristic or moralizing terms. Even today, New Age sentimentalists search frantically for any metaphysical solace that might palliate the harshness of neo-Darwinian struggle. We hear tales of beneficent feedback mechanisms (Gregory Bateson, James Lovelock), of heartwarming cooperative endeavors (Francesco Varela, Stephen Jay Gould), of synchronic species progression (Rupert Sheldrake), or of strange attractors at the end of history (Terence McKenna). These are all visions of a world without insects, one in which change would always conform to our petty bourgeois standards of niceness and comfort. Burroughs and Cronenberg know better, as do biologists like Richard Dawkins. We live, as Burroughs reminds us, in a “war universe.” If we want to survive, we must avoid the facile self-deceptions of teleological and rule-driven explanations. Let us rather construct our “war machines” according to pragmatic, immanent, selectionist principles. Mammalian immune systems in fact already work in this way: they “learn” to recognize and destroy enemy proteins as a result of differential reproduction rates among widely varying T cells. Similar models for the adaptive growth of neurons in the human brain—“neural selectionism” and “neural Darwinism”—have been proposed by Gerald Edelman, Steven Pinker, and others. And artificial intelligence research has started to explore the possibilities of allowing selectional processes to operate blindly, instead of imposing predetermined algorithms. All such selectional systems are what Deleuze and Guattari call desiring machines or bodies without organs: they are not closed structures, but relational networks that “work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down.” Breakdowns are inevitable, since the process of adaptation is never rapid enough to keep up with the pace of continual change. And every breakdown brings to the fore an immense reservoir of new, untapped differences and mutations: material in random variation upon which selection can operate. These selectional processes, therefore, do not guarantee us anything in advance. They do not provide for a future that will comfortingly resemble the present or the past. They do not help us to imagine how things might be better—that old utopian fantasy, much beloved of “progressive” social critics. Rather, their political efficacy lies in this: that they actually work to produce differences we could not ever have imagined. They provoke innovations far stranger and more radical than anything we can conceive on our own. “I love the uncertainty of the future,” as Nietzsche so stirringly wrote.

So cultivate your inner housefly or cockroach, instead of your inner child. Let selectional processes do their work of hatching alien eggs within your body. And don't imagine for a second that these remarks are merely anthropomorphizing metaphors. We can kill individual insects, as spiders do; but we can't for all that extricate ourselves from the insect continuum that marks life on this planet. The selectional forces that modulate insect bodies and behaviors are also restlessly at work in our own brains, shaping our neurons and even our thoughts. Does such an idea revolt you? The problem might be that we can't read insect expressions: we don't know what they are thinking, or even if they are thinking. But this may just be an unwarranted vertebrate physiological prejudice; after all, “insects are naturally expressionless, since they wear their skeletons on the outside” (Christopher Wills). Watch for when the insect molts, and its inner vulnerability is exposed.

We should reject all distinctions of inner and outer, as of nature and culture. How could you ever hope to separate genetic influences from environmental ones, or biology from sociology? Those social critics who think “biological” means ahistorical and unchanging—and reject naturalistic explanations on that basis—clearly don't know what they are talking about. The bizarre, irreversible contingencies of natural history and cultural history alike stand out against all endeavors to endow life with meaning, goal, or permanence. Entomology is far less essentialistic, far more open to difference and change, far more attentive to the body, than are, say, cultural critiques grounded in Frankfurt School post-Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. It's common in well-meaning academic humanist circles to loathe and despise sociobiology. But this isn't just a matter of disputing some rather dubious claims about particular aspects of human behavior. What many of my colleagues really can't forgive is sociobiology's insistence upon biological embodiment itself. It's not really a question of whether this or that gender trait is really “written in our genes,” so much as it is a case of the panicky denial of evolutionary contingency, or genetic limitation, altogether. “Dialectical” biologists like Richard Lewontin, together with their social-determinist allies, merely perpetuate a massive, and quite traditional, idealization of human culture: one that has long fueled delusive fantasies of redemption and transcendence, and that has served as an alibi for all sorts of controls over people's lives, and moralistic manipulations of actual human behavior. Edward O. Wilson, to the contrary, made only one real mistake when he came to systematize the discipline of sociobiology: this was his choice of ants, rather than houseflies or cockroaches, as an implicit reference point for examining “human nature.” Be this as it may, entomological intuitions continue to be more illuminating and provocative than narrowly humanistic ones. Maurice Maeterlinck well expressed the uncanny fascination of insect life nearly a century ago: “The insect brings with him something that does not seem to belong to the customs, the morale, the psychology of our globe. One would say that it comes from another planet, more monstrous, more dynamic, more insensate, more atrocious, more infernal than ours.” What has changed in this picture in the last one hundred years? Only one thing. We postmoderns have come to realize that such alien splendor is precisely what defines the cruelty and beauty of our world.