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Viroid Life
Nietzsche's vision of the 'overman' continues to haunt the postmodern imagination. His call that 'man is something that must be overcome' can no longer be seen as simple rhetoric. Our experiences of the hybrid realities of artificial life have made the 'transhuman' a figure that looks over us all. Inspired by this vision, Keith Ansell Pearson sets out to examine if evolution is 'out of control' and machines are taking over.
In a series of six fascinating perspectives, he links Nietzsche's thought with the issues at stake in contemporary conceptions of evolution from the biological to the technological. Viroid Life; Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition considers the hybrid, 'inhuman' character of our future with the aid of Nietzsche's philosophy. Keith Ansell Pearson contrasts Nietzsche and Darwin before introducing the more recent figures such as Giles Deleuze and Guy Debord to sketch a new thinking of technics and machines and stress the ambiguous character of our 'machine enslavement'.
In a series of six fascinating perspectives, he links Nietzsche's thought with the issues at stake in contemporary conceptions of evolution from the biological to the technological. Viroid Life; Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition considers the hybrid, 'inhuman' character of our future with the aid of Nietzsche's philosophy. Keith Ansell Pearson contrasts Nietzsche and Darwin before introducing the more recent figures such as Giles Deleuze and Guy Debord to sketch a new thinking of technics and machines and stress the ambiguous character of our 'machine enslavement'.
- GenresPhilosophy
216 pages, Paperback
First published June 26, 1997
3 people are currently reading
98 people want to read
About the author
Keith Ansell-Pearson
47 books39 followersKeith Ansell-Pearson joined Warwick's Philosophy Department in 1993 and has held a Personal Chair since 1998. He did his graduate studies at the University of Sussex. He has presented lectures around the world, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United States. In 2013/14 he was Senior Visiting Research Fellow in the Humanities at Rice University.
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September 24, 2025
“The possibility of metaphor is disappearing in every sphere. This is an aspect of a general tendency affecting all disciplines as they lose their specificity and partake of a process of contagion - a viral loss of determinacy which is the prime event of all the new events that assail us. (Baudrillard 1993: 7)”
“Nietzsche thus does not accept that the 'drive for preservation' is the cardinal drive in the evolution of organic life:
One cannot ascribe the most basic and primeval activities of protoplasm to a will to self- preservation, for it takes into itself absurdly more than would be required to preserve it; and, above all, it does not thereby 'preserve itself, it falls apart. The drive that rules here has to explain precisely this absence of desire for self-preservation.
(ibid.: section 651)
Darwinism overestimates utility in evolution on account of its privileging of the influence of external circumstances. In positing 'self-preservation' as the principal law of life Nietzsche argues that modern natural sciences are entangled in a 'Spinozistic dogma' that erroneously universalizes as a general principle of evolution particular conditions of existence (such as the idea that every living thing desires to maintain itself in its own being) (see Spinoza 1955: 136-7).”
“The phenomenon of symbiosis provides the clearest demonstration of this thesis, presenting a genuine challenge to the entire Occidental tradition of speculative thought and suggesting the urgency of adopting a rhizomatic praxis. The image of the tree has dominated 'all of Western thought from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, all of philosophy ...' (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 18). These new anthropocentric readings of history lead to the entirely spurious claim that with the coming of computers and the arrival of robot intelligence the planet is now entering a 'silicon age'. What this ignores is the fact that metallurgy has an ancient prehuman history, with human metalworking following the bacterial use of magnetite for internal compasses by almost three thousand million years (Margulis and Sagan 1995: 194). Moreover, symbiosis has a filthy lesson to teach us: the human is an integrated colony of amoeboid beings, just as these amoeboid beings (protoctists) are integrated colonies of bacteria. Like it or not, our origins are in slime. Biologists have established that the nucleated cell of eukaryotic life evolved by acquisition, not of inherited characteristics à la Lamarck's model of evolution, but of inherited bacterial symbionts”
“The attempt to develop a general theory of evolutionary systems is entirely dependent on the kinds of problems being set up. To consider the nature of species, organisms, and evolution itself, independently of the cognitive framing and mapping of theoretical inquiry - and all theory needs to be understood as a praxis (Reuleaux 1876/1963: introduction) - is to produce nothing but reification. As Bergson pointed out in his thinking of 'creative evolution' in 1907, our science is contingent, relatively both to the variables it selects and to the order in which is successively stages problems (Bergson 1983: 219). Conceptions of
'evolution' only make sense in relation to time-scales within which they are framed. For example, from the perspective of universal evolution' species and organisms cannot be treated as fixed or static points of reference or interpreted as the end-points of life's novel activity of invention. The boundaries between species are constantly shifting, mobile, and porous, while geographical landscapes harbour only extrinsic harmonies of an order of ecology in which any equilibrium between populations can only be regarded as temporary. Indeed, on a certain model one could legitimately claim that the 'success' of a species is to be measured by the speed at which it evolves itself out of existence. Deleuze and Guattari's most radical gesture is to suggest that there has never been purely 'biological' evolution, since 'evolution' is technics”
“We find in Difference and Repetition major tensions emanating from the uneasy alliance Deleuze makes between the competing claims of 'complexity' and 'selection'
' In the work with
Guattari primacy is clearly given to 'involution' over 'evolution' and to modes of deterritorialization, that is, to the power of endogeny over that of exogeny: 'The more interior milieus an organism has ... assuring its autonomy and bringing it into a set of aleatory relations with the exterior, the more deterritorialized it is' (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 53 4). It is precisely the 'creative' reality of deterritorialization that Deleuze was articulating in Difference and Repetition in such novel terms and that serves to link the work up with current complexity theory in philosophical biology. For example, in Difference and Repetition, the 'formula' for
'evolution' (Deleuze has the word in scare quotes) is given as: 'the more complex a system, the more the values peculiar to implication appear within it' (Deleuze 1994:
255).? It is the 'centres of envelopment' that function as both a 'judgement' of the complexity of any given system and as the differenciator of difference…in the spatial organization and folding of their cells. Such an insight counters the reductionism of those biologists who place the emphasis on the determination of genes and so erase the trace of genetic indetermination. It is precisely the endogenous powers of spatio-temporal rhythms and intensities that Deleuze is privileging in Difference and Repetition as a model of 'evolution' over the strictly exogenous mechanism of selection. This thesis is now supported by leading complexity theorists such as Stuart Kauffman who argue that many of the highly ordered features of ontogeny are not to be regarded as the achievements of selection, but rather as the self-organized behaviours of complex genetic regulatory systems. Moreover, the properties of self-organization are so deeply immanent in these complex networks that
selection
cannot avoid that order (Kauffman 1993: xvii). On this model selection can in no way be regarded as the sole or primary generator of evolutionary order and composition. When in Difference and Repetition Deleuze calls for a 'kinematics of the egg, insisting that what is seminal in embryology is not the division of an egg into parts, but rather the morphogenetic movements”
“A strand of contemporary biology has sought to move away from the genetic reductionism of ultra-Darwinism - best typified in Richard Dawkins's Schopenhauerean-styled theory of the selfish gene - insisting that questions of form cannot be reduced to those of simple adaptation, since the organism enjoys an integrity and autonomy of its own and has to be treated as a self-organizing structural and functional unity (see Goodwin 1995). But this move from genetic reductionism to organismic holism in complexity theory is by no means a straightforwardly progressive move. The 'organism' is always extracted from the flows, intensities, and pre-vital singularities of pre-stratified, non-organic life in order to produce, through techniques of normalization, hierarchization, and organization, a disciplined body, a controlled subject and a subject 'of" control.
The organized body of both biology and sociology is an invention of these techniques of capture and control. It is the judgement of theos: 'You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body - otherwise you're just depraved. (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 159). This explains why it becomes necessary to think about machines, about the reality of parts and wholes, about machinic modes of 'evolution', and about a 'machinic surplus-value that produces an excess which cannot be located within a 'subject' since it lies outside.
Evolution, like the egg, does not take place in the open air: invention in evolution takes place not simply in terms of a process of complexification, say from a less to a more differentiated state, … It is this 'block of becoming' that represents the 'transversal communication' between heterogeneous populations, making becoming a rhizome and not a classificatory or genealogical tree.”
“Guattari has rightly insisted that the question of the ontogenetic evolution of the machine, for example, is not reducible to the 'linear causalities of the capitalistic apprehension of machinic Universes' (1992:79; 1995: 52).
In machinic heterogenesis it is less a question of the identity of a being that retains its heterogeneous texture while traversing different regions, and more of an 'identical processual persistence'. One is speaking neither of a Platonic whole nor of an Aristotelian prime mover, but rather of transversal creatures that
'appear like a machinic hyper-text' (Guattari 1992: 151; 1995: 109). Guattari's insight into this universe of machinic heterogenesis requires a fundamental reconfiguration of ontology. An ontology informed by an appreciation of the machine would not place qualities or attributes as secondary in relation to substance, nor would it conceive of being as a pure and empty container of all possible modalities of coming-into-being. Rather, it would conceive being as first and foremost 'auto-affirmation' and 'auto-consistency' which actualizes itself through virtual and diverse relations of alterity. This would mean that we would cease viewing existence-for-itself and for-others in terms of the privilege of one particular 'species', such as mankind, and appreciate that everywhere 'machinic interfaces engender disparity and, in return, are founded by it' (ibid.: 152; 109).
'Being' ceases to be a general ontological equivalent and becomes modelled along the lines of 'generative praxes of heterogeneity and complexity' (ibid.). Evolution by symbiosis - the vitality of viroid life - and rhizomatic becomings constitute an essential part of this heterogeneity and complexity.”
“the social definition of what is technologically feasible or desirable is not external to technology but intrinsic to it... Capitalism rests on a particular conjunction of technical and social machines. As a distinct social formation it functions by turning the technical machines into constant capital”
“The State exists to regulate the decoded flows unleashed by the schizo-tendencies of capitalism.
While capital melts down everything that is solid and profanes all that is holy, bourgeois society guarantees that the productive forces of change are rendered equilibrial through the territorially fixed and juridically invariant structure of the modern State (Balakrishnan 1995: 567)
Moreover, through State regulation and control the decoding practices of science and technics are subjected to a social axiomatic that is more severe than any putative scientific axiomatic. The social and cultural revolution of postmodernity is about the potential liberation of technical machines from monopolistic and scientistic control by the molar forces of capture that characterize the modern capitalist State, a bifurcation point at which capitalism is no longer able to monopolize for itself technical machines.”
“At present what we are witnessing within the discernible logic of post-modernity is a transition from the thermodynamic machines of industrial capitalism to the cybernetic machines of contemporary information societies that govern through intelligent control. But this is still a mutation within entropic (post)modernity in which the development of new forces of production outstrips existing relations of production but in no way guarantees their radical transformation or liberation from social control and molarization... Did the 'political' die with the collapse of the great empires, including the great empires of thought (-control)? Today the life of the great empires has assumed a retroviral form, fragmented and peripheral, genetically infecting their wastes and by-products, their basic cells and ugly growths, no longer on the order of the political but of the transpolitical whose passion, notes Baudrillard, is that of the interminable work of mourning, lost in 'the melancholy of homeopathic and homeostatic systems', in which evidence for the death of the political is impermissible since it would 'reintroduce a fatal virus into the virtual immortality of the transpolitical' (Baudrillard 1994: 51)... There is only the contagion of technics and the freedom of becoming imperceptible, invisible, and ignoble.”
“The modern project of emancipation through the maturity of enlightenment was novel in not being governed by the past, being in essence futural. In this way it has served the process of complexification, the process which ironically leads to its own demise. The illusion it endures, however, is believing that the entropy of time and its neg-entropic evolution can be made subject to human history…now firmly entrenched in such a condition, devotionally mourning the event of lost time for the rest of time…a strand of thought in the late nineteenth century, notably in the writings of Henry Adams, which was taken up again in more recent times by Jacques Ellul in the 1950s.
Adams, for example, believed that history was governed by a law of acceleration which involved a process of increasing energy, organization, and complexity that defied all attempts at either conscious direction or opposition. When the machines land we humans simply become the carriers of their will: 'A law of acceleration', he wrote, 'cannot be supposed to relax its energy to suit the convenience of man' (Adams 1931: 493). On this model of the time of the inhuman, history is reduced to physics in which historical development is to be accounted for in terms of the government of thermodynamics, the science of the relationship of heat and mechanical energy. The increase in energy and organized complexity is what constitutes the anti-entropic becoming of material reality.
There are a number of problems afflicting this well-worn depiction of evolution by neg-entropy (there is nothing postmodern about it). For all its talk of complexity, or complexification, it rests on a dubious linear, rational, additive accumulation (see ibid.: 63), with the result that on this model technics does become Geist.”
“Nietzsche thus does not accept that the 'drive for preservation' is the cardinal drive in the evolution of organic life:
One cannot ascribe the most basic and primeval activities of protoplasm to a will to self- preservation, for it takes into itself absurdly more than would be required to preserve it; and, above all, it does not thereby 'preserve itself, it falls apart. The drive that rules here has to explain precisely this absence of desire for self-preservation.
(ibid.: section 651)
Darwinism overestimates utility in evolution on account of its privileging of the influence of external circumstances. In positing 'self-preservation' as the principal law of life Nietzsche argues that modern natural sciences are entangled in a 'Spinozistic dogma' that erroneously universalizes as a general principle of evolution particular conditions of existence (such as the idea that every living thing desires to maintain itself in its own being) (see Spinoza 1955: 136-7).”
“The phenomenon of symbiosis provides the clearest demonstration of this thesis, presenting a genuine challenge to the entire Occidental tradition of speculative thought and suggesting the urgency of adopting a rhizomatic praxis. The image of the tree has dominated 'all of Western thought from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, all of philosophy ...' (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 18). These new anthropocentric readings of history lead to the entirely spurious claim that with the coming of computers and the arrival of robot intelligence the planet is now entering a 'silicon age'. What this ignores is the fact that metallurgy has an ancient prehuman history, with human metalworking following the bacterial use of magnetite for internal compasses by almost three thousand million years (Margulis and Sagan 1995: 194). Moreover, symbiosis has a filthy lesson to teach us: the human is an integrated colony of amoeboid beings, just as these amoeboid beings (protoctists) are integrated colonies of bacteria. Like it or not, our origins are in slime. Biologists have established that the nucleated cell of eukaryotic life evolved by acquisition, not of inherited characteristics à la Lamarck's model of evolution, but of inherited bacterial symbionts”
“The attempt to develop a general theory of evolutionary systems is entirely dependent on the kinds of problems being set up. To consider the nature of species, organisms, and evolution itself, independently of the cognitive framing and mapping of theoretical inquiry - and all theory needs to be understood as a praxis (Reuleaux 1876/1963: introduction) - is to produce nothing but reification. As Bergson pointed out in his thinking of 'creative evolution' in 1907, our science is contingent, relatively both to the variables it selects and to the order in which is successively stages problems (Bergson 1983: 219). Conceptions of
'evolution' only make sense in relation to time-scales within which they are framed. For example, from the perspective of universal evolution' species and organisms cannot be treated as fixed or static points of reference or interpreted as the end-points of life's novel activity of invention. The boundaries between species are constantly shifting, mobile, and porous, while geographical landscapes harbour only extrinsic harmonies of an order of ecology in which any equilibrium between populations can only be regarded as temporary. Indeed, on a certain model one could legitimately claim that the 'success' of a species is to be measured by the speed at which it evolves itself out of existence. Deleuze and Guattari's most radical gesture is to suggest that there has never been purely 'biological' evolution, since 'evolution' is technics”
“We find in Difference and Repetition major tensions emanating from the uneasy alliance Deleuze makes between the competing claims of 'complexity' and 'selection'
' In the work with
Guattari primacy is clearly given to 'involution' over 'evolution' and to modes of deterritorialization, that is, to the power of endogeny over that of exogeny: 'The more interior milieus an organism has ... assuring its autonomy and bringing it into a set of aleatory relations with the exterior, the more deterritorialized it is' (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 53 4). It is precisely the 'creative' reality of deterritorialization that Deleuze was articulating in Difference and Repetition in such novel terms and that serves to link the work up with current complexity theory in philosophical biology. For example, in Difference and Repetition, the 'formula' for
'evolution' (Deleuze has the word in scare quotes) is given as: 'the more complex a system, the more the values peculiar to implication appear within it' (Deleuze 1994:
255).? It is the 'centres of envelopment' that function as both a 'judgement' of the complexity of any given system and as the differenciator of difference…in the spatial organization and folding of their cells. Such an insight counters the reductionism of those biologists who place the emphasis on the determination of genes and so erase the trace of genetic indetermination. It is precisely the endogenous powers of spatio-temporal rhythms and intensities that Deleuze is privileging in Difference and Repetition as a model of 'evolution' over the strictly exogenous mechanism of selection. This thesis is now supported by leading complexity theorists such as Stuart Kauffman who argue that many of the highly ordered features of ontogeny are not to be regarded as the achievements of selection, but rather as the self-organized behaviours of complex genetic regulatory systems. Moreover, the properties of self-organization are so deeply immanent in these complex networks that
selection
cannot avoid that order (Kauffman 1993: xvii). On this model selection can in no way be regarded as the sole or primary generator of evolutionary order and composition. When in Difference and Repetition Deleuze calls for a 'kinematics of the egg, insisting that what is seminal in embryology is not the division of an egg into parts, but rather the morphogenetic movements”
“A strand of contemporary biology has sought to move away from the genetic reductionism of ultra-Darwinism - best typified in Richard Dawkins's Schopenhauerean-styled theory of the selfish gene - insisting that questions of form cannot be reduced to those of simple adaptation, since the organism enjoys an integrity and autonomy of its own and has to be treated as a self-organizing structural and functional unity (see Goodwin 1995). But this move from genetic reductionism to organismic holism in complexity theory is by no means a straightforwardly progressive move. The 'organism' is always extracted from the flows, intensities, and pre-vital singularities of pre-stratified, non-organic life in order to produce, through techniques of normalization, hierarchization, and organization, a disciplined body, a controlled subject and a subject 'of" control.
The organized body of both biology and sociology is an invention of these techniques of capture and control. It is the judgement of theos: 'You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body - otherwise you're just depraved. (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 159). This explains why it becomes necessary to think about machines, about the reality of parts and wholes, about machinic modes of 'evolution', and about a 'machinic surplus-value that produces an excess which cannot be located within a 'subject' since it lies outside.
Evolution, like the egg, does not take place in the open air: invention in evolution takes place not simply in terms of a process of complexification, say from a less to a more differentiated state, … It is this 'block of becoming' that represents the 'transversal communication' between heterogeneous populations, making becoming a rhizome and not a classificatory or genealogical tree.”
“Guattari has rightly insisted that the question of the ontogenetic evolution of the machine, for example, is not reducible to the 'linear causalities of the capitalistic apprehension of machinic Universes' (1992:79; 1995: 52).
In machinic heterogenesis it is less a question of the identity of a being that retains its heterogeneous texture while traversing different regions, and more of an 'identical processual persistence'. One is speaking neither of a Platonic whole nor of an Aristotelian prime mover, but rather of transversal creatures that
'appear like a machinic hyper-text' (Guattari 1992: 151; 1995: 109). Guattari's insight into this universe of machinic heterogenesis requires a fundamental reconfiguration of ontology. An ontology informed by an appreciation of the machine would not place qualities or attributes as secondary in relation to substance, nor would it conceive of being as a pure and empty container of all possible modalities of coming-into-being. Rather, it would conceive being as first and foremost 'auto-affirmation' and 'auto-consistency' which actualizes itself through virtual and diverse relations of alterity. This would mean that we would cease viewing existence-for-itself and for-others in terms of the privilege of one particular 'species', such as mankind, and appreciate that everywhere 'machinic interfaces engender disparity and, in return, are founded by it' (ibid.: 152; 109).
'Being' ceases to be a general ontological equivalent and becomes modelled along the lines of 'generative praxes of heterogeneity and complexity' (ibid.). Evolution by symbiosis - the vitality of viroid life - and rhizomatic becomings constitute an essential part of this heterogeneity and complexity.”
“the social definition of what is technologically feasible or desirable is not external to technology but intrinsic to it... Capitalism rests on a particular conjunction of technical and social machines. As a distinct social formation it functions by turning the technical machines into constant capital”
“The State exists to regulate the decoded flows unleashed by the schizo-tendencies of capitalism.
While capital melts down everything that is solid and profanes all that is holy, bourgeois society guarantees that the productive forces of change are rendered equilibrial through the territorially fixed and juridically invariant structure of the modern State (Balakrishnan 1995: 567)
Moreover, through State regulation and control the decoding practices of science and technics are subjected to a social axiomatic that is more severe than any putative scientific axiomatic. The social and cultural revolution of postmodernity is about the potential liberation of technical machines from monopolistic and scientistic control by the molar forces of capture that characterize the modern capitalist State, a bifurcation point at which capitalism is no longer able to monopolize for itself technical machines.”
“At present what we are witnessing within the discernible logic of post-modernity is a transition from the thermodynamic machines of industrial capitalism to the cybernetic machines of contemporary information societies that govern through intelligent control. But this is still a mutation within entropic (post)modernity in which the development of new forces of production outstrips existing relations of production but in no way guarantees their radical transformation or liberation from social control and molarization... Did the 'political' die with the collapse of the great empires, including the great empires of thought (-control)? Today the life of the great empires has assumed a retroviral form, fragmented and peripheral, genetically infecting their wastes and by-products, their basic cells and ugly growths, no longer on the order of the political but of the transpolitical whose passion, notes Baudrillard, is that of the interminable work of mourning, lost in 'the melancholy of homeopathic and homeostatic systems', in which evidence for the death of the political is impermissible since it would 'reintroduce a fatal virus into the virtual immortality of the transpolitical' (Baudrillard 1994: 51)... There is only the contagion of technics and the freedom of becoming imperceptible, invisible, and ignoble.”
“The modern project of emancipation through the maturity of enlightenment was novel in not being governed by the past, being in essence futural. In this way it has served the process of complexification, the process which ironically leads to its own demise. The illusion it endures, however, is believing that the entropy of time and its neg-entropic evolution can be made subject to human history…now firmly entrenched in such a condition, devotionally mourning the event of lost time for the rest of time…a strand of thought in the late nineteenth century, notably in the writings of Henry Adams, which was taken up again in more recent times by Jacques Ellul in the 1950s.
Adams, for example, believed that history was governed by a law of acceleration which involved a process of increasing energy, organization, and complexity that defied all attempts at either conscious direction or opposition. When the machines land we humans simply become the carriers of their will: 'A law of acceleration', he wrote, 'cannot be supposed to relax its energy to suit the convenience of man' (Adams 1931: 493). On this model of the time of the inhuman, history is reduced to physics in which historical development is to be accounted for in terms of the government of thermodynamics, the science of the relationship of heat and mechanical energy. The increase in energy and organized complexity is what constitutes the anti-entropic becoming of material reality.
There are a number of problems afflicting this well-worn depiction of evolution by neg-entropy (there is nothing postmodern about it). For all its talk of complexity, or complexification, it rests on a dubious linear, rational, additive accumulation (see ibid.: 63), with the result that on this model technics does become Geist.”
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