With Metal
and Flesh, Ollivier Dyens wants to explore what he calls "the
emergence of a cultural biology." 
By this phrase, he means at least two things:  both the apparent need to extend commonly-accepted definitions of
such putatively biological terms as "life" to a variety of phenomena,
systems, and entities not normally thought to be living, as well as the
supposedly ever-increasing interpenetration of cultural products and artifacts
with living things, both human and otherwise.  
These ideas are certainly evocative and challenging; unfortunately, the
book has little enlightening to say on the subject.

Metal and
Flesh is a slim book, but aims at a large range of ideas and claims.  Indeed, its bold scope–a survey of apparent
sea-changes in the understanding of the idea of life against the background of
twentieth century cultural productions–is a large part of the problem.  The desire to address such large themes
often results in generalizations without adequate support and overly quick
treatments of complex ideas.  Part of
the problem here comes down to style. 
In his introductory notes, Dyens writes that the "ideas presented
in this book do not follow a rigid linear narrative as tradition would have it,
but are rather to be read as a series of loosely connected thoughts revolving
around… two central themes" (3). 
At the same time, however, he aims to "prove" various claims
about the intersection of biology and culture. 
This is difficult; without straightforward argumentation, it is much
harder to claim proof.  Of course, it is
possible to address ideas seriously without following "traditional"
modes of reasoning, and an elliptical style is not necessarily the mark of poor
ideas.  One can think of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations, for instance, a widely admired work despite its unconventional
style.  In the case of Wittgenstein,
however, it is well known that he spent much time organizing and re-organizing
the various segments of his work, hoping by process of juxtaposition and
ordering to convey something of his thought. 
Metal and Flesh, for its part, reads as if insufficient care was
given to the process of organizing ideas, and much of it reads as if it were a
series of off-the-cuff observations, with little attention given over to
thematic and ideological coherence.

Dyens offers
the reader a collection of cultural readings ranging from modern film to
cyberpunk fiction to chaos theory.  His
central and novel idea is that "culture," by which he seems to mean
anything that can be considered a manifestation of intelligence, forms its own
biosphere, in the sense that modern technological and social forms interconnect
a wide range of entities, which ought to be seen as "living" within a
shared environment.  Life, in the sense
used here, is broadly defined to include any systematic use of
representations.  The range of such
living things is wide indeed, for "[e]very system, whether biological,
planetary, meteorological, or ecological must repoduce and use representations
in order to survive and become more complex" (6).  Such a claim, I think, shows a primary
problem with this work.  The definition
of "life" here is so broad as to encompass nearly anything one might
imagine.  While this is in fact a
central thesis of Metal and Flesh, it is based on a use of "representation,"
which is so wide-ranging as to be nearly empty. 

An example is
in the treatment of viruses, a central idea in the book.  As described in the second chapter of the
book, viruses must be considered as living beings, not only because of their
ability to replicate and spread, but because they "manipulate
representations," in the sense that they adapt to their environment,
changing form to counter antiviral defenses, and to spread to new types of
hosts (46).  Thus, a "representation"
in this sense is simply any change in structure, whether that structure be
neural or simply physical, and so "intelligence" comes down to any
change in reaction to the environment. 
This sort of easy move from metaphor to factual claim characterizes much
of the intellectual style at work here. 
It is certainly interesting, say, that scientists have used the
mathematics of complex systems to analyze not only brain function but weather
patterns.  Still, this no more makes
weather patterns an instance of intelligent behavior than does the usefulness
of basic planar geometry in the construction of both doghouses and suspension
bridges make the first suitable in the role of the second.  Surface similarities between theories and
ideas may seem intriguing, but real understanding comes as much from seeing
where our notions cannot be applied as from seeing where they can.

Too often, Metal
and Flesh suffers from this failure to distinguish potentially interesting
metaphors from factual claims of identity, or uses the former as the basis for
sudden leaps of reasoning to the latter. 
Thus, from the fact that modern plastic surgery can produce the
simulacrum of physical traits originally desirable perhaps as signals of
reproductive fitness, we move to the claim that "Pamela Anderson… is no
longer a human being" (21).  The
use of the language of viruses to deal with the phenomenon of malicious
computer programs engenders the claim that "cyberspace [is] conscious and
intelligent" (29).  A potentially
interesting line of thought about the difficulty of distinguishing
digitally-generated imagery from photographs of real subjects becomes an
argument that when the image of a person is rendered digitally, he no longer
belongs to organic reality" (86).

Interesting and
challenging ideas pop up throughout the book. 
It is certainly worth thinking about how biotechnology will influence
our sense of identity, say, or about how the modern interpenetration of human
cultures with one another, and with the natural world, affects the epidemiology
of disease.  Metal and Flesh moves
too quickly over these (and many other) issues, however, satisfying itself with
rather too-quick claims about how human beings have become "cyborgs,"
or about how viruses serve as the central form of communication in the modern
age.  The role of technology in human
life is an important topic, and has always been so since the advent of speech
led to the rapid evolution of mankind millennia ago.  This book mentions such challenging ideas, but their real
development is neglected.  In the end, a
reader interested in the idea of the role of technology (and viruses) in human
culture would be better served by a book such as Jared Diamond’s recent Guns,
Germs, and Steel.

© 2003 Martin Allen

M. Allen is an ABD student in philosophy
at the University of Pittsburgh, currently working on the subject of formal
similarities between various apparently distinct logical systems.  In addition, he is pursuing a second
graduate degree in computer science at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst.  His interests include
theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, particularly
planning.

Categories: Philosophical