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Metaphors and monstersFred Botting

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ISSN 1479-7585 Print/ISSN 1740-1666 online/03/040339-27 © 2003 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1479758032000165020

Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2003, 339–365

Metaphors and Monsters

Fred Botting

AbstractNeither poetry nor creativity, neither technology nor experimentation, are what or

where they used to be. Metaphor and monstrosity, as manifested by the power andpervasiveness of code in information theory, biotechnological practice and culturalrepresentation, are tellingly transformed in the shift from modernity to hypermodernity.Frankenstein, an inaugural and persistent myth of modern monstrosity, continues toinform and disturb popular fascinations and scientific research: its currency, itsmonstrous metaphorical resonance, when associated with genetics and technology, raisefar-reaching questions concerning the imbrication of human norms, esthetic productions,scientific power and any vision of a future.

Making myth

Only by a long stretch of the imagination can Frankenstein be called ageneticist. But it is precisely the imagination that, in Mary Shelley’s fiction, isstretched as tightly as the sallow skin across the monster’s face. Frankenstein’spursuit of the “principle of life” is driven by ardent imagining. His work isrepeatedly dressed up in the language of Romanticism, in terms of wonder, visionand enthusiasm. The discovery of the “secret of life”, a secret the cautionaryelement of his tale refuses to disclose, is also described as the discovery of “thecause of generation and life” (Shelley 1969:39). Even before it identifies andmasters this cause, the imagination, in excess of reality, benevolently andhumanistically projects a realm of life beyond death, disease and suffering and, inmore personal terms, elevates the scientist to a divine status as a father of aneternally grateful “new species” (Shelley 1969:54). An alchemical transmutationof new life from an assemblage of dead body parts suggests a fantasticaldimension underlying the practical scientific labor of successful creation.

Imagination and science, romance and reality, art and experimentation, are notsimply opposed in the novel. The division of faculties between arts and sciences hasyet to occur. Poets, like Shelley’s husband, Percy, dabbled in experimentation andscientific theory. The imbrication of what are later divided into two cultures,however, is enabled by a distinction between models of science. In the novel, theyoung student encounters two professors, each with different notions of scienceand scientific method (Cosslett 1982). The first, Krempe, a professor of naturalphilosophy, is horrified to learn of the time Frankenstein has wasted on the worksof the alchemists. He is quick to criticize their “exploded systems” and institute anew regime of study. Frankenstein’s grand visions are cut down to size, exchangedfor “realities of little worth” (Shelley 1969:46). His professor of chemistry,

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Waldman, has a markedly different approach. Not only does he speak in terms ofclassification, facts and experimentation, he distinguishes the man of science fromthe “petty experimentalist” in grander expostulations: dabbling in dirt, with eyesporing over microscope and crucible, the scientist nonetheless performs miracles,penetrates the recesses of nature, ascends to the heavens in discoveries of thecirculation of blood and the components of air. There is, for sure, a hint of alchemyin the rhetoric of harnessing “new and almost unlimited powers”, or capturing theability to “command the thunder of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mockthe invisible world with its own shadows” (Shelley 1969:47). Waldman’s rhetoric,like his scientific field, echoes that of Humphrey Davy who, in his lectures onchemistry, expatiated on the promise and potential of scientific discovery (Crouch1971). The language, moreover, resonates with Romantic esthetics to fill a world ofobjects, effects and causes with sublime emotions and visions of wonder.

Frankenstein is as much Romantic poet as experimental scientist: as the poetanimates dead letters with a creative spirit, so the scientist infuses dead matterwith the spark of life. If one were to follow the association of poet and scientist inthe long and entangled reception history of Frankenstein, it is the former whoought to receive more blame for the tragic consequences of creation: thoughscientific techniques allow the creature to be made in a practical sense, art isresponsible for making the monster, for the act of rejection that creates a lonely,wretched and vengeful outcast. The only grounds for rejection given by the novelare esthetic: the creator is repulsed by the physical appearance of his creation. Nomatter how wonderful such an act of creation may be as a technical achievement,it fails to match up to the exorbitant fantasies that gave shape to the work in thefirst place. In its causes and effects, then, imagination finds itself inextricablybound up with, even as it remains in excess of, reality.

Only after the novel was written do now familiar judgements about therelationship between art and science manifest themselves (Botting 1991). Somereviewers of the time find a strong element of immorality in the underlying ideaof the novel. Popular melodramatic adaptations of the 1820s bring out the themeof presumption (Forry 1990). It is a theme subsequently acknowledged in theauthor’s introduction to the 1831 edition, where the scientist is said to be“mocking the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” (Shelley1969:9). Receptions and recreations of the novel continue the process, distillingthe relationship of art and science into a clear-cut duality. The novel istransformed into the first cautionary tale of scientific research, laying out thedangers of meddling, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, in matters beyond humanunderstanding and control. It becomes synomymous with an irresponsibletampering with the natural order, unleashing powerfully destructive forces. Thethreat of monstrous consequences thus establishes a limit between the selfishambitions of human endeavor and the balance of a natural order, marking a linethat, if crossed, leads to disaster. Another hierarchy also appears in the divisionbetween art and science: the former supplies the moral vision lacking in the latter,attempting to return technological innovation to an older framework based on thebounded opposition of humanity and nature, a relationship that technology wasalready dangerously supplementing. If cultural commentators and critics remainconcerned by the morality of art, insisting on the superiority of an estheticallyordered moral code, the popular appeal of the novel and its variants, in whichFrankenstein and monster enter modern mythology, is as much to do with

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sensation, excitement and emotion as moral or rational understanding. Monstersgive form to fears, desires and anxieties, allowing the channelling and expulsionof emotional energies. In its infectious myth-making, art, it seems, does notsimply conjure up and circulate a series of colourful representations of sciencethat develop independently and according to their own generic and culturalmomentum: science is implicated in and affected by the process since it neverremains outside the cultural sphere.

As scientist, Frankenstein has, despite minimal scientific reference in the novelitself, become associated with the apparatuses, tubes, vials and wires oflaboratory labor. From early political caricatures that represent reform asunwarranted scientific experimentation with the social body (Baldick 1987; Forry1990) to early Hollywood’s gigantic scientific-Gothic sets, the tools of the tradeform a crucial appendage to the vision of monstrous creation (O’Flinn 1995).“Frankenstein” enters the language, somewhat ambiguously applying to bothcreator and creation, to name any product of experimentation that causes concernin crossing the borders of humanity and nature. Even Thomas Edison’s talkingdoll, manufactured in the later 1800s, a toy modelled on the work of automatamakers a century before, is seen as a “scientific Frankenstein monster” (Wood2002:122). A century later nuclear technologies are seen through the screen ofShelley’s novel, with anxieties about the power of atomic science understood as“fathering the unthinkable”; that is, in unnaturally usurping female reproductivepower gives birth to a destructive energy capable of effacing humanity and natureat a single stroke (Easlea 1983). Aware of concerns “about what genetics is doingto the future”, Steve Jones (1993) asks the common question: “Are we in dangerof producing a race of Frankensteins?” before asserting the fact that the “newbiology has brought little but benefit” and thoughtfully retrospeculating thatgenetics may have helped Mary Shelley in her suffering from child loss anddepression (Jones 1993:223–4)

Though noting that the novel “has been generalised to apply to almost anytechnology”, Jon Turney focuses on the “special affinity” it holds with“technologies of life” (1998:160). In tracing this affinity, he draws out the manyrepresentations of different branches of the life sciences that invoke Frankenstein,from reports on experimental physiology in the 1920s (Turney 1998:83) to thework of contemporary molecular biology which itself promoted the idea that ithad uncovered the “secrets of life” (Turney 1998:135) and, of course, to accountsof human cloning in which Frankenstein emerges like a “genetic engineer”(Turney 1998:220). As a “myth of modernity”, Frankenstein vents “its deepestfears and desires” concerning the “violability of the human body” (Turney1998:8). But when the secret of life is found in genetic form what is most intimateto being is simultaneously rendered general and external: with moleculargenetics, “the essence of what lies within is not to be thought at the level oforgans, or even cells. It is information” (Turney 1998:219). In opening the body upto scrutiny and technological intervention, its boundaries are no longer delimitedby the skin, but spread across the new social and economic formation as the codeconnecting networks across the globe. Frankenstein’s reference spreads at thesame time: the phrase “Frankenstein revolution” is applied to the new directionsof genetic research (Ryder 1990:192); “Frankenstein foods” becomes the popularname for genetically manipulated agricultural products. Even life that has noorganic component whatsoever enjoys the same association: “Von Neumann was

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aware of the stigma assigned to those who tried to produce lifelike processes byartificial means. The ghost of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster, or any othernumber of more recent science fictions, casts a mottled shadow over suchenterprises” (Levy 1992:17). Artifical life, drawn from the work of cyberneticists,in which code is electronic and binary rather than genetic, finds itself included ina telling embrace: information has become the new terrain of living, of creationand of technological innovation and, of course, the locus of a new species ofmonsters. It is thus no surprise that Frankenstein, which inaugurates modernity’spopular fascination with artificially created life, retains its currency.

Mary Shelley’s protagonist – or, rather, protagonists, if one is to include themonster (or protagonist if one is to imply that both, like the misapplication of thename “Frankenstein” itself, form a single but curiously doubled being) – has, itseems, made two lasting cultural impressions: the first, in molding a popular andpersistent idea of the experimental scientist, has shrouded science in suspicionand clouded objectivity and experimentation with baser motives like desire,ambition and selfish short-sighted immorality; the second sees the novel, almostagainst itself, and certainly in contrast to the refusal of its eponymous protagonistto make a female of the species, spawn, throughout modern culture, new races ofmonsters and scientists (and often indistinguishable combinations of both), batchafter batch of proliferating, mutating monster-scientists, hybrids whose artifical,textual, cinematic evolution has seemingly run out of all control, in fictions and aswell as science. Indeed, the division which sees art attempt to elevate itself byproviding the moral vision and humane authority ignored by science, does notleave the latter unaffected, to continue its experiments according to properrational and objective principles.

The fictions which engender fear, desire, excitement and terror do not allowscience to remain isolated from the culture in which it operates and which itsinnovations are supposed to serve. Instead, they shape popular perceptions ofscientific practice and – “Frankenstein foods” provides a strong example –inform reactions to the products of research and development. So much so thatMary Shelley, nearly 200 years on, has been blamed for the current negativeattitude to science and scientists. Lewis Wolpert has repeatedly commented onthe misperceptions engendered by Shelley’s novel, noting how it serves as“shorthand for the dangers of science” and observing that it was Shelleyherself “who created the monster, not science” (Wolpert and Richards 1988).Wolpert wants to reestablish the division that separates art from science,wishing the former kept its misperceptions to itself, thus allowing the latter toget on with its own business. But the imaginary, literary and metaphoricalassociation, it seems, has too strong a hold on the imagination: “the very term‘genetic engineering’ conjures up the image of Frankenstein and his monster”,writes Wolpert, going on to describe Shelley as “the unintentional evil fairygodmother of genetics”. Literary imaginings, in literary form, continue tohaunt science, its demons, it seems, too intensely embedded in culture to expel.The very fact of contemporary science arguing over Romantic texts testifies toa continued irritation that is put down to the effects of fiction. Fiction, with itseffects on the popular imagination, bothers science, an affront, perhaps, to itsrationality and discipline. More than offering idle decorations of cultural life,fiction has effects, distorting the truth and reality of the scientific world. Inupsetting rationality and objectivity, in provoking emotional responses to, and

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from, science, fiction induces a disturbance within the scientific project that itmust attempt to cast out.1

In asking the question, “Are movies impeding the progress of biotechnology?”,Stephen Nottingham (1999) makes a similar double gesture that recognizes theeffects of fiction on science while trying to expunge them. His argument notes themanner in which myth frames cultural experience and metaphor shapesperceptions. His case, however, not only complains against the extensive popularcultural misrepresentations of science, it attempts to counter negative images bymaking a cultural, rather than scientific, claim: he invokes esthetic categories topromote science: “scientific knowledge can be intrinsically beautiful and on theside of the poets”. Richard Dawkins’ (1996) claims about the capacity of scienceto evoke awe are cited in support of this esthetic power. Elsewhere, Dawkins hascalled upon and complained against poets and poetic power. He criticizes theRomantic position in respect of scientific rationality. For Keats and Blake, sciencesucceeds only in “clipping an Angel’s wings” and conquering sacred mysteries.But Dawkins is eager to play poetry against the poets in a fantastic encounter:

I wish I could meet Keats or Blake to persuade them that mysteries don’t losetheir poetry because they are solved. Quite the contrary. The solution often turnsout more beautiful than the puzzle, and anyway the solution uncovers deepermystery.

The appeal to mystery and beauty finds another eminent advocate from science,no less a figure than Einstein: “the most beautiful thing we can experience is themysterious. It is the source of all true art and science” (cit. Dawkins 1996). Sciencedoes not dabble profanely among monstrosities, but sings with the poets. On ahigher level, a plane of beauty and mystery, poets and scientists are united.

Divisions between art and science, perpetuated for over a century, arereconciled, monstrous misperceptions corrected by the shared quest, one that isboth esthetic and scientific. This position, however, draws as much on a RomanticFrankenstein as that isolating its monster-making: the novel was as concerned withesthetics as it was with science, and though popular myth-making hashighlighted the figure of the monster in adaptations and revisions of the story, theissues of poetry, beauty and mystery remain integral to the questions it poses.There would be no monster without Frankenstein whose aims are shaped asmuch by Romantic esthetics and humanistic values as they are by scientific ideasfrom Davy, Volta and Darwin. In the figure of his mentor, Waldman, a fictionalrendering of Davy, the position of a beautiful and mysterious science, asadvanced by Dawkins, is already made plain. Dawkins’ claims, then, partake ofthe same tradition as that which represents scientific monstrosity. Science, itseems, does not only inherit the monstrous component of Frankenstein’srepresentations, the uncontrollable figure that exceeds its creator, it also adoptsthe esthetic system, the creative aspiration, that informs the project in the firstplace. Doubles of the other, the poetic and the monstrous are born together.

Monsters emerge in the traversal of esthetic and scientific enquiry, the doubledantithesis of systems of beauty and mystery. Both systems, rather than one orother, are infused with the capacity to produce monstrosity. Confounding art andscience, esthetic artifice and nature, poetic and technological creativity, Franken-stein articulates and upsets the oppositions that define modernity, its monstrosity

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as myth and text refusing the straightforwardly modern divisions and dualisms.The text does not merely represent monstrosity, it offers a sustained reflection onproductions, including its own, of monstrosity. As a text, it is monstrous, suturingdifferent narratives together and reflecting upon their interrelations. As a culturalmyth, it continues to perform monstrously, not only in the generation of so manynew monsters, but in the way that these monsters, like the being created byFrankenstein, interrogate the world they inhabit and the systems that make themmonsters.

Making monsters

Monsters have a long biological and textual history. In modernity, however,they are born with the classificatory sciences, integral to the taxonomies thatidentify and order species rather than mere curiosities to be looked upon in idlewonder. Discussing the emergence of modernity, a new discursive formation inwhich biology develops from natural history, Michel Foucault plots the differentfunctions of monsters, noting their necessity as beings enabling the identificationof “visible species”, allowing the latter to be “separated out from the ceaselessbackground of monstrosities that appear, glimmer, sink into the abyss, andoccasionally survive” (Foucault 1970:154). Monsters, it seems, are not deviationsfrom nature, but form the condition for the emergence of species, as natural asanything else in a system in which proper species and deviations are initiallyinseparable. According to J-B Robinet they take the form of “metamorphoses ofthe prototype just as natural as the others” (cited in Foucault 1970). They aresimply the effects of a natural process at work, a “means of passing” preparingthe transition from one form to another: “it is only, perhaps, by dint of producingmonstrous beings that nature succeeds in producing beings of greater regularityand with more symmetrical structure” (cited in Foucault 1970:155). In this respect,Foucault notes, monsters disclose their “necessity’, “forming the backgroundnoise, as it were, the endless murmur of nature” (155). Monsters, for the systemsthat identify them, however, serve other functions, ensuring “in time, and for ourtheoretical knowledge, a continuity” (156).

There are two natures disclosed by monsters: that which is ordered, classifiedand regulated by scientific discourse, and that which remains undifferentiated, inprocess. Monsters form the point of articulation between the two, located as partof the undifferentiated murmur or noise of natural process and marked out in theidentification of proper and recognizable species: “on the basis of the continuumheld by nature, the monster ensures the emergence of difference” (cited inFoucault 1970:156). Monsters, then, are split in two: no more, nor less, than effectsof natural process, no different from other beings, as Robinet suggested. But, inrespect of the systems of differentiation to which they give rise, they become,retrospectively, monsters, beings out of place in a nature ordered and classifiedaccording to scientific principles that cannot countenance them other than asmonsters. For Foucault, they are “merely the backward projection of thosedifferences and identities that provide taxonomia first with structure, then withcharacter” (Foucault 1970:157). Hence monsters survive as an invented category,as the excess of categorization, the non-categorizable category in which“monstrous” beings are placed in order to ensure the stability and continuity ofscientific systems of differentiation. Internal but excluded, the condition that

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precedes differentiation and yet allows the production of difference and identity,the double status of monsters remains both necessity and threat. If monsters areretrospectively identified as beings “out of nature”, even though their existence isno more than evidence of undifferentiated natural process, the only nature fromwhich they are excluded is that classified by science: to alter the perspectiveslightly, in the manner that the ambivalence of monsters often demands, it isscience and its nature that appears as monstrous excresence.

The ambivalence of the monster is always, given its retrospective function,something of a metaphor providing form for what is formless. It inhabits texts asmuch as nature. A strange biotextual entity, it marks a crossing where the real andthe world of symbols confound each other. As Jacques Derrida notes, a monstertakes the form of “a composite figure of heterogeneous organisms that are graftedon to each other”. Such “hybridization”, he continues, also applies to certainkinds of writing, texts composed of diverse and heterogeneous elements.Monsters, however, are also imbricated in the demarcation of limits and norms:“faced with a monster, one may become aware of what the norm is and when thisnorm has a history”, thus allowing “an analysis of the history of norms” (Derrida1992:385–6). Monsters thus glimmer on boundaries of normalcy, fantasmaticprojections of fear and desire, excess and prohibition. But the monster is not solelya “chimerical figure”, it is “always alive”. It possesses a singular andunrecognized appearance, “a species for which we do not yet have a name”.Though without name, it “does not mean that the species is abnormal, namely, thecomposition or hybridization of already known species”. In showing itself, “itshows itself in something that is not yet shown and that therefore looks like ahallucination, it strikes the eye, it frightens precisely because no anticipation hadprepared one to identify this figure” (Derrida 1992:386). Appearing in a form thatcannot be recognized, that is, an appearance whose formlessness demands theprojection of a form that metaphor provides, monsters remain visible and yetunseen, alien to habits of perception, on the fringes of comprehension.

Inadequate though it must be, the metaphor of monster registers an encounterwith something unrecognized, marking the glimpse of a shadowy figure fromwhich eyes are averted, “the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself andwhich can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under thespecies of a nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form ofmonstrosity” (Derrida 1998:293). Liminal, speechless, formless, the apprehensionof the monstrosity lurking at the limit of sense does not remain an unformedfigure of a difference that cannot be assimilated, of some Thing altogether other.Rather, it is apprehended by metaphor, the appellation of monster rendering itfamiliar, recognizable, defined and excluded in the form of monster:

But as soon as one perceives a monster in a monster, one begins to domesticate it,one begins, because of the “as such” – it is a monster as monster – to compare itto the norms, to analyze it, consequently to master whatever could be terrifyingin this figure of the monster. And the movement of accustoming oneself, but alsoof legitimation and, consequently, of normalization, has already begun. (Derrida1992:386)

Monsters do not remain monstrous, the metaphor sees to that, projectingsomething more familiar in the space of monstrosity in order to screen out the

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formlessness which is too horrific to countenance, “too threatening for thepowers-that-be”. The metaphor of monster gives the unnameable some kind ofname, like Frankenstein (“wretch”, “outcast”), but not a proper name that stampsbeing with place, paternity and a genealogy. The monster is not included in thenorms that it brings to light. It remains outside normal classification, while stillbeing classified as the limit of the norm. Indeed, the domestication of the monsteras monster keeps it in its place insofar as that place remains different from thenorm. Hence monsters are brought under the sway of law, not in order that theybecome subjects of its protection or inclusion: marked as monsters, they can belegitimately, even violently, policed and excluded.

Making metaphor

A being formed of the fragments of books as much as bodies, Frankenstein’screation is bound up with writing, representation, with the textual in-forming ofreality and conferral of identity, monstrous or otherwise. A screen for theprojection of fantasies, fears, anxieties, a being whose first encounter with its self-image is from the reactions of others and the journals of his creator, the monstergoes forth and prospers, as Shelley bids it, as text, as figure, as metaphor.Monsters, indeed, are formlessness figured, figures disfigured, misshapen shapesthat lurk on the outer reaches of systems of classification and representation,shadowy forms for what is yet unformed, without name and place. Thatmonsters, in modernity at least, are made implies an active process by whichthreatening entities are named as nameless, thereby excluded, rendered other,“monstered” by systems of perception, understanding, or representation. In thisprocess, metaphor comes to the fore as both the conferring of names in place ofthat which can have no name; that is, substituting the name of “monster” in placeof the disturbing absence of nomenclature, or in bestowing another name, that ofa father, say, which situates being in the proper social and symbolic circuit. As,always already, metaphor, the term “monster” discloses, demonstrates even, themonstrosity of metaphor itself: metaphor, a constitutent of poetic language,makes beauty, enhances expression in its substitutions and comparisons. But italso makes monsters, gives repellent form to unformed entities. Metaphors shapereality, framing the world that is inhabited. At the same time, they distort what isreal, substituting figures in place of objects and things (that language, of course,distinguishes), thereby demonstrating the entanglement of linguistic figures inthe ordering of the world as it is lived and perceived. As metaphor, monstersreflect back on metaphor’s necessity in the very constitution of human reality.

Metaphor – and hence its monstrosity as well as creativity – is not just restrictedto the realm of poetry and rhetoric, it is “pervasive in everyday life, not just inlanguage but in thought and action”, crucial in structuring “how we perceive, howwe think, and what we do” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:3–4). And metaphors, bothnew and old, “can have the power to define reality” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:157).For Paul Ricoeur, metaphor “exploits the creativity of language” (Ricoeur 1991:70).Its creativity, moreover, stems from both polysemy and a deviation fromconventional usage of words. Here metaphor “does not merely actualize a potentialconnotation, it creates it” (Ricoeur 1991:79). In this respect it exceeds a simplyrhetorical or decorative mode associated with poetic language and challenges theidea that it designates a straightforward substitution of one term for another. It

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supplements ordinary language which often fails to live up to “the challenge ofunderstanding” (Ricoeur 1991:73). In supplementing, of course, it supplantsmimetic functions of representing reality or reflecting thought. Metaphor invents;it innovates. In doing so, it “redescribes reality, breaking through prior categories oflanguage and thought and establishing new logical boundaries on the ruins ofpreceding ones” (Ricoeur 1991:81). Ricoeur’s argument addresses both poetry andscience, not as distinct uses of language, but in the manner that both affect reality.Poetry is not a mode of language that abolishes conventional reality in favor ofworlds of the imagination: it opens the possibility of reshaping the real. Likescientific models (which explain something unknown in terms of familiarexamples) it functions as a “heuristic fiction” and as such prepares the way for a“redescription of reality” that, while offering no empirical information, “maychange our way of looking at things, a change which is no less real than empiricalknowledge”. Thus poetry offers “a new way of being in the world, of orientatingourselves”. Similarly, “with metaphor we experience the metamorphosis of bothlanguage and reality” (Ricoeur 1991:84). Fiction and images, Ricoeur argues,operate in the same manner, not only fleshing out meaning, but manifesting thecapacity to invent it: “fictio comes from facere” and so “when the image is made, it isalso able to remake the world” (Ricoeur 1991:129).

If poetry, images and fiction redescribe and create, so, too, does scientificdiscourse. Ricoeur is critical of attempts to produce a transparent language thatclearly presents things as they are or fixes a one-to-one relation of words andobjects in the world. “This dream of a radical and complete reformulation of thewhole of our language”, he writes, noting the efforts of scientists andphilosophers like Leibniz, Russell and Wittgenstein to identify “the rules of alanguage which would be the exact picture of the structure of facts”, is a projectthat “must fail” (Ricoeur 1991:75). Science, in its search for clearer and more stabledefinitions, replaces words with symbols whose abstraction breaks any link theremight have been been with natural language (Ricoeur 1991:74). Scientificdiscourse cannot exempt itself, no matter how much it might like to, from theeffects of metaphor and fiction. Ricoeur’s analysis sets out to “extend the conceptof fiction beyond language and the plastic arts, and to acknowledge the work ofthe analogies, models, and paradigms in the conceptual field of scientificknowledge” (Ricoeur 1991:135). As “heuristic fictions for redescribing reality”,scientific models and analogies work in the fashion of metaphor’s “productivereference”, shaping and creating an experience of the world as much as reflectingit (Ricoeur 1991:135). Ricoeur, however, does acknowledge an importantdifference between between the status of scientific and poetic language, despitethe strangely productive metaphorical effects both may have:

Under the shock of fiction, reality becomes problematic. We attempt to elude thispainful situation by putting beyond criticism a concept of reality according towhich the “real” is whatever our everyday interests project upon the horizon ofthe world. This prejudice is not displaced but reinforced by our scientific culturein that for science, reality is what science declares it to be; only scientific discoursedenotes reality. (Ricoeur 1991:133)

Reality is a projection, an effect of metaphorical screens. That projection ismasked by claims to truth and transparency. But, for Ricoeur, neither truth norreality guarantee the predominance of scientific discourse, only “prejudice” does

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that. Science remains a fiction, a way of presenting, perceiving and inhabiting theworld as though it is true, but it is a fiction that has the authority to pronounceon the true nature of reality.

Monsters, of course, both help establish and also challenge the authoritativefiction of science, “too powerful or in any case too threatening for the powers-that-be” (Derrida 1992:285). To associate scientists and scientific practice withFrankenstein is thus to refuse their authority and reshape the reality sciencepresents. Perhaps it is not only the metaphor of the monster that disturbsscientists like Wolpert, though it does cast a negative, fictional shadow over theenterprise. Rather, the metaphor of the monster draws with it the monstrosity ofmetaphor: metaphor arrives from a cultural position outside scientific discourseto “misprepresent” it, but also works on that discourse from within, operating atthe heart of its methods, models and analogies and disclosing that scientificrationality, objectivity and empiricism remain bound up with the creativity of ametaphorical language. The monstrosity of metaphor discloses what science’sentire project refuses to countenance: entangled with metaphors and models,scientific discourse not only describes the world, but redescribes and reshapes itin its own image. Its authority, as a heuristic fiction and not a table of facts, thusremains threatened by the very figures and metaphors on which it is based,subject to their uncontrollable and unscientific recreations and deviations.Monstrous indeed.

Scientific discourse cannot dispense with metaphor, it inhabits its dreams ofperfection and nightmares of realization. With metaphor, creativity and mon-strosity remain impossibly entangled. Divisions and dualities, between reasonand imagination, art and reality, so carefully policed in modernity and sohorrifyingly confounded at its outset in Frankenstein’s doubled crossings, arefurther confounded in the move to post- or hypermodernity, where esthetics isharder to distinguish from reality and nature finds itself almost entirelyconsumed by technological artifice. Code, as metaphor and model for arevolution in scientific practice, is inscribed in this shift as it defines a differentera: technology and biology, furnished with their informational models, areable to do far more than understand nature or reflect reality but assumehitherto unprecedented powers of intervention, transformation and creation.Genetic modification, the enhancement of crop resistance and yields, genetictherapies for effacing diseases, cloning, “designer babies”, disarm nature as anobstacle to experiments that are both practical and esthetic. The formerdistinguishes those efforts that may be justified by notions of usefulness:“Frankenstein foods” may be defended because yields are improved andstarving humans are fed. Their counterpart, however, reveals a different aspect:the “TK-1” is a zebra fish modified with a jellyfish gene that glows a yellowishgreen in the dark (Shaikh 2002). An accident of genetic research, it is merelyornamental and to be marketed with other leisure and aquatic pet shopproducts and novelties, so Willis Fang, the Taikong Corporation President,hopes, as “Night Pearls” (Dean 2003). But they already have a popular name,the first in a new species: “Frankenstein pets”. The same research, then, thataims to make specific genes more visible to DNA experiments can make prettythings that glow in the dark. Distinctions between usefulness and uselessnessare difficult to maintain. At levels of practicality and esthetics, the aim toenhance innovation and performance is not governed simply by benevolence,

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knowledge or beauty but according to critieria of economic efficiency, marketand profit.

With the increasing evidence of technoscience’s extensive poetic or creativepowers, fears of uncontrollable mutations are also exacerbated, hence theproliferation of so many technobiological “Frankensteins”. Paul Virilio outlineshis own nightmare vision in which art and biotechnology merge in a newteratological formation. Frankenstein, of course, lurks in the background of thismerger, while Monsanto, the “Terminator” in particular, advances beyondbiotechnology: “Aren’t we talking about a form of necro-technology aimed atensuring one firm’s monopoly? Thanatophilia, necro-technology, and one daysoon, teratology . . . Is this genetic trance still a science, some new alchemy, or isit an extreme art?” (Virilio 2003:58). For Virilio, the answer is already evident:“extreme art”, on the model of extreme sports, is defined by a purelyperformative drive. What he calls “transgenic art” marches in the vanguard and“aims at nothing less than to embark BIOLOGY on the road to a kind of‘expressionism’ whereby teratology will no longer be content just to studymalformations, but will resolutely set off in quest of their chimeric reproduction”(Virilio 2003:51). An esthetico-scientific enterprise, transgenic art will inhabitmuseums and magazines, but it will emanate from “every pharmacy, everylaboratory” launching “its own ‘lifestyles’, its own transhuman fashions” (Virilio2003:61). As esthetics and science collide, art and fear, poetry and monstrosity, arereconfigured, increasingly part of the everyday technoscientific world rather thandecorative idealizations or imaginative excesses. With code, as metaphor, model,system and practice, there is little to distinguish language, become binary, fromreality, turned virtual, and nothing to separate genetic and digital creation frommonstrosity.

Technopoetics

Code defines the entirety of postwar technological and consumer society, a newworld order in which relations of knowledge, production, power and representa-tion are totally reconfigured. Digital and biological, “the metaphysics of code”, inBaudrillard’s phrase, marks a shift from an industrial era of production to aperiod in which consumption, simulation and hyperreality predominate. Newmodels of control are instantiated, doing away with transcendent values andhuman progress:

Cybernetic control, generation through models, differential modulation, feed-back, question/answer, etc.: this is the new operational configuration (industrialsimulacra being mere operations). Digitality is its metaphysical principle (Leibniz’sGod), and DNA is its prophet. In fact, it is in the genetic code that the “genesis ofsimulacra” today finds its completed form. (Baudrillard 1983a:57)

Informational and genetic, these models of control are extended throughoutsystems of government and economy: “biochemistry hypostasises the ideal of asocial order governed by a kind of genetic code, a macromolecular calculus by thePPBS (Planning Programming Budgeting System), its operational circuits radiat-ing over the social body” (1983a:59). It leads to “social control by means ofprediction, simulation, programmed anticipation and indeterminate mutation, all

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governed, however, by the code” (Baudrillard 1983a:60). In operating like acomplete biotechnological system, programmed, directed, organized, on strictlybinary principles, the system appears to function like a homogeneous machine, itsexchanges generating only an excess of the same.

While it appears to inscribe a homogenizing, monologistic system, itsfunctioning requires a constant injection of difference. At the end of SymbolicExchange and Death, poetry surfaces as an insurrection against all forms ofsymbolic exchange. All sorts of apparently anti-economic features – freedom,uselessness, wastage, expression – associated with poetic discourse’s ruination ofsense and meaning are seen to “govern the repoduction of both material goodsand the species itself” (Baudrillard 1983:201). In the final chapter to The Illusion ofthe End an “unverifiable” “poetic reversibility of events” is hypothesized, a chaoticform distinguishing an endless ironized present from the illusion of linear historyand social phenomena (Baudrillard 1992:120). Here poetry manifests a strangesupplementarity in respect of the dominant code of contemporary hyperreality:because the inscription of code is not determined by anything outside itself thereis no end in a teleological or finite sense to the “endless escalation” it demands.What appears, its excess and major effect in the order of simulations and code, isan obliteration of prior modes of operativity such as those pertaining to themorality, rationality and utility guiding bourgeois modernity. A “postmoderncapitalism” thus no longer has the capacity to differentiate useful and uselesseconomic activity or distinguish values in moral terms (Goux 1990). “Anythinggoes” as Lyotard comments, when it comes to the eclecticism of postmodernstyles, anything going, esthetically speaking, as long as money is its lubricant(1984:79).

An underlying and consumerist sameness governs information flows, asNorbert Wiener pointed out: “More and more we must accept a standardizedinoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white bread of bakeries, ismade rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its food value”(1954:132). There is a contant tension between a homogenizing trajectory and thethe demand for innovation: “the prevalence of cliches is no accident, but inherentin the nature of information” (Wiener 1954:119). Information, if it is to beconsidered information at all, must contain something unpredictable, new orsurprising so that it functions as, in Bateson’s definition, “any difference thatmakes a difference” (1973:428). Without the continual supplementation ofdifference, information remains a circulation of the same, subject to entropicdevaluation. For Wiener, commenting on the necessity of difference in informa-tion theory, “the more probable a message, the less information it gives. Cliches,for example, are less illuminating than great poems” (Wiener 1954:21). Whereeveryday messages slide into a sameness and predictability that minimizeinformational currency, poetry, like noise perhaps, enhances its value. There is akind of cyberpoetics at work here, a work neceassary to the renewal andcomplexity of the system, an internal challenge to the homogenizing tendencies ofits own functioning. Indeed, a form of poiesis is crucial to any open, living system,as Maturana and Varela’s combination of information theory and biology argues:they coin the term “autopoiesis” (a neologism, indeed, inspired by literature). Forthem, noise is not an excess that merely disturbs or disorients the system, as inMacKay’s definition: “any uncorrelated disturbance which upsets the system bymaking it perform selections that were not intended” (1961:5). Noise is crucial to

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the development of complexity in self-organizing systems: it is used adaptivelyand productively to stave off informational entropy and enhance complexity; it isthus crucial to autopoietic – or self-making – systems. The analogy has beenextended further, taking cybernetic theory into analyses of cultural and literaryforms to see the latter as “the noise of culture”:

the disorder, the noise of literary language can become information for us, canbring us to more subtle forms of understanding, because it is the unexpected, theradically different to which we can respond only because we are already complexbeings capable of more complexity. (Paulson1988:99)

Through noise, the autopoiesis that defines living systems is united with thepoiesis that traditionally forms the lifeblood of culture: a unity, however,established, not in nature, but on the plane of information theory.

There is a poetics to the genetic code, one that, again, finds scientific practiceimplicated in the work of metaphor. In her cultural history of the genetic code,Lily Kay traces the way that cybernetics and information theory reshaped thesciences of molecular biology and inaugurated the thinking that turned “code”into the discovery of the “book of life”. There is a long history to this metaphor,like that of the “book of nature”, but the combination of information theory andbiological sciences gave it new, and powerful, currency in the shaping of research:“this metaphor of transcendent writing acquired new, seemingly scientificlegitimate meaning through the discourse of information” (Kay 2000:2). Genesseemed to carry an originary writing, one that was the basis of all life, as ThomasSebeok proposes in his discussion of genetics and semiotics: “today it is clear thatthe genetic code must be considered as the most basic semiotic network, andtherefore as the prototype of all other systems of signification used by animals,including man” (cit Baudrillard 1983a:59). But genetic code is neither a naturallanguage nor a code, as Kay is keen to point out:

from linguistic and cryptanalytical standpoints, the genetic code is not a code: itis simply a table of correlations, though not nearly as systematic or predictive asthe periodic table, for example, because of the contingencies, degeneracies, andambiguities in the structure of so-called genetic code. (Kay 2000:2)

Language is similarly not a code, its plurality refusing the one-to-one correspond-ence that cryptography (or indeed empirical science) requires. When used in thebinary context of computing or word processing, however, language is made towork like a code (Hayles 1999:30). Even Francis Crick acknowledged that theterm “code” was technically incorrect and should be replaced by the moreaccurate “cipher”, but, he continued, “ ‘genetic code’ sounds a lot more intriguingthan ‘genetic cipher’ ”. The appeal of the word “code” lies, not in any technicalprecision, but in its metaphorical resonance. For Kay, this preference for coderather than cipher manifests “the poetics of the technosciences” (Kay 2000:52).

The “contingencies, degeneracies, and ambiguities” of code make it appear lesslike a code and more like a text. Discussing the usefulness of metaphors fromcybernetics and language in genetic research, Kay argues that simple transcrip-tions of coding give way to a more complex play of Derridean writing: “for evenif the genome were to be a text and DNA a language, reading the ‘Book of Life’

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would be hardly ambiguous, for language is context-dependent and words arepolysemic” (Kay 2000:xviii). Noting the complex contextualization of geneticresearch in processes of protein folding, DNA sequencing, multicellular organiza-tion and epigenetic networks, Kay goes on: “genetic messages might be read lesslike an instruction manual and more like poetry, in all their exquisite polsemy,ambiguity, and biological nuances” (Kay 2000:xix). Where language, messagesand genes are concerned, code – as a transfer of terms from one system intoanother – opens up a variety of signifying possibilities that diverge fromstraightforward deciphering. As Roland Barthes has suggested of the text, “in themultiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered”. Hegoes on:

the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceasely positsmeaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption ofmeaning. In precisely this way literature . . . by refusing to assign a “secret”, anultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may becalled an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since torefuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason,science, law. (Barthes 1977:147)

Writing, textuality, refuses the style of criticism that, while proclaiming itsdiscovery, or deciphering, of the author’s own meaning in the work, actuallyprojects the critic’s values onto it, thereby, in the name of the Author-God,authorizing its own position through the retrospective identification of theMeaning in a retrospective and jubilant (“victory to the Critic”, writes Barthes)projection of one overriding metaphor, the one term that substitutes for the entiretext. In contrast, the revolutionary liberation from (critical) authority frees thereader to read the text in terms of its playful multiplicity of connexions andrelationships. The position, however, cannot be not grounded in a single orunifying figure. Meaning’s evaporation leaves only an open text, one whereinmany meanings may be produced. It is not, then, an exact science legitimating onesingle practice or delivering a final, authoritative secret.

The infopoetics of code and text addresses the con- and divergent questions oflanguage, metaphor and technoscience. Concerns about the value and effects ofcode, information and software open two related trajectories for understandingthe role of metaphor: one discloses older assumptions about the relationshipbetween words and things in which issues of reference, nature and adequatedescription underline their difference; the other trajectory engages moreproblematically with the productive imbrication of signifiers and the world. Kay’sextensive survey of the exchanges between cybernetics and molecular biologydocuments numerous scientific promotions of or skepticism towards theassociation of genes and language. In the titles of numerous books, like GeorgeBeadle’s The Language of Life (1966), where the book metaphor is extended todescribe genetics as the discovery of the Rosetta stone, or Robert Sinheimer’s TheBook of Life (1967), the scriptural analogy is enthusiastically affirmed (Kay2000:17). Others, like Marcel Florkin, remain critical of the value of the analogy asit becomes “molecular biosemiotics” (Kay 2000:27). Steve Jones employs theanalogy quite readily and without any self-consciousness. Hence there are noquotation marks:

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The language of the genes has a simple alphabet, not with twenty-six letters, butjust four. These are the four different DNA bases – adenine, guanine, cytosine andthymine (A, G, C and T for short). The bases are arranged in words of three letterssuch as CGA or TGG. Most of the words code for different amino acids, whichthemselves are joined together to make proteins, the building blocks of the body.(Jones 1993:3)

While the code metaphor can be used uncritically as a straightforward model,questions about its salience persist. James Griesemer’s examination of codingmetaphors and genetic research interrogates the relationship in more criticalterms. Opposing living and dead metaphor, it addresses the limitations of code ingenetic theory and practice, noting the failure of the former to contribute togenetic solutions. Genes remain “prisoners of the cell”. However, the analysis ofde Duve’s notion of a second genetic code enables a significant turn in theapproach to work on the code metaphor: while the metaphor fails in respect ofreference or descriptive validity when it comes to nature and biologicalreproduction, it retains its value as a model for mechanisms of scientific process,that is, it offers a way of understanding, not code itself, but the empirical practicesof scientists involved in coding.

Words and things remain in their separate spheres, crossing only in respect ofscientific practice. The realm of nature is exempt from the effects of metaphor:though science becomes more wordly, more reflexive and metaphoricallyentangled, things of nature carry on doing their biochemical, evolutionary thing.In Griesemer’s analysis metaphor only entwines scientists and scientific practiceas subjects and objects of the coding process. This neat move, which acknowl-edges the role of metaphor on one level while disavowing it on another, operatesin the same manner as the shift in cybernetic research from the study of closedsystems and feedback loops to self-organizing systems and noise. It correspondsto to the move made by Heinz von Foerster, in Observing Systems (1960), to“second-order cybernetics”; that is, the application of cybernetic principles tocyberneticists (Hayles 1999:10). The ambiguity in the pun of the title, in whichliving, open systems are capable of observing other systems and themselves assystems, brings science and its objects of study into close proximity: both areobserving systems, subjects and objects of observation. The reflexivity introducedinto scientific practice blurs boundaries between observation and natural process,word and thing. Indeed, when it is observed that observing systems have effectson the systems they observe – Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – then thedistinction between natural processes and scientific observations of them isindeterminable. Griesemer’s attempt to maintain some distance between met-aphor and gene does not last long. The potency of the “book of life” metaphor, asKay notes, demonstrates how discursive figures shape, direct and complicatepractices as “a way of knowing and doing” (Kay 2000:xviii). Cybernetic theoryhistorically served to “reorient molecular biology” and, at the same time“fundamentally altered the representations of animate and inaminate phenom-ena” (Kay 2000:5). Figures, metaphors, models and analogies have significanteffects on the conduct of research and its findings: “as discursive practices –modes of articulating, representing, and intervening – informational tropes andmodels guided the conceptualizations, interpretations, and material practices ofthe subsequent experiments to determine the other code ‘words’ ” (Kay 2000:256).

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Metaphor, no longer mere linguistic ornamentation, has, it seems, moved wellbeyond literary parameters. Instead, generalized, it inscribes itself inextricablywithin science.

Monstering metaphor

Historically, metaphor has been made inimical to the language of science, itsmonsters being no more than fantastic, chimerical, imaginative and literarycreations. The development of science in the nineteenth century is predicated ona division of language and literature. In his account of the configuration ofbiology, economy and language as a discursive formation of modernity, MichelFoucault analyzes the shift from Classical epistemology, based on a “reciprocalkinship between knowledge and language”, to a new modern relationship: “thenineteenth century was to dissolve that link, and to leave behind it, inconfrontation, a knowledge closed up to itself and a pure language that hadbecome, in nature and function, enigmatic – something that has been called, sincethat time, Literature” (Foucault 1970:289). Language, demoted to the status of anobject, was neutralized and polished in scientific usage so that “it could becomethe exact reflection, the perfect double, the unmisted mirror of a non-verbalknowledge”, and hence transparent to thought (Foucault 1970:296–7). Incompensation for the demotion of language, literature appears, reconstituted “inan independent form, difficult of access, folded back upon the enigma of its ownorigin and existing wholly in reference to the pure act of writing” (Foucault1970:297). The dissolution of the links on which Classical epistemology wasbased, paves the way for modernity’s separation of transparent and literarylanguages. Subsequently, with the onset of postmodernity, the dissolution of thedistinction between language and literature signifies a crisis in modernity.

To exemplify the second dissolution, Kay’s discussion of the use of the codemetaphor identifies how rhetorical tropes intervene in scientific practices:

When applied metaphorically to biological phenomena “information” becomeseven more problematic: it seems actually to restore its first sense as intelligenceand meaning, but as such it violates the precepts of information theory, whichsupposedly legitimized the biological applications. It thus becomes a metaphor ofmetaphor, a catachresis, and a signifier without a referent. (Kay 2000:24).

Sliding into a process of unanchored, irreferential metaphorization, catachresismanifests a failure of language to stay in its place. According to Paul de Man, in“The Epistemology of Metaphor”, empirical philosophy has always been hauntedand threatened by metaphor, tropes and figural language. Analyzing Locke’sEssay Concerning Human Understanding, de Man argues that “once the reflectionon the figurality of language is started, there is no telling where it may lead. Yetthere is no way not to raise the question if there is to be any understanding. Theuse and abuse of language cannot be separated from each other” (1996:41). As asignificant instance of an “abuse” of language, catachresis opens language tometaphoric play by mixing linguistic modes:

They are capable of inventing the most fantastic of entities by dint of thepositional power inherent in language. They can dismember the texture of realityand reassemble it in the most capricious of ways, pairing man and woman or

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human being with beast in the most unnatural shapes. Something monstrouslurks in the most innocent of catachreses: when one speaks of the legs of a tableor the face of a mountain, catachresis is already turning into prosopopeia, and onebegins to perceive a world of potential ghosts or monsters. (de Man 1996:41–2)

The failure of metaphor to stay in its proper place and the resulting doublings ofmetaphor produce – metaphorically in de Man’s case – a world of unnaturalcombinations. But when the failure and doubling of metaphor occur in scientificlanguage, the deviation from proper use engenders different ghosts andmonstrosities, ones that become palpable.

There is a further concern about metaphor that emerges in the move frommodern to hypermodern discourse, a concern evoked by the extent of metaphor’sfailure to stay in its proper place. Not only does metaphor disturb the imaginedconsistency and transparency of scientific language, in a similar manner to theway it disturbs philosophy (Derrida 1982), its effects extend beyond language,letting monsters loose in the world. Kay’s discussion of the catachresis of the codemetaphor suggests that more than a simple abuse of language is at stake, arguingmolecular biology

used “information” as a metaphor for biological specificity. However, “informa-tion” is a metaphor of metaphor and thus a signifier without a referent, acatachresis. As such, it became a rich repository for the scientific imaginaries of thegenetic code as an information system and a Book of Life were inextricably linked.Metaphors . . . are ubiquitous in science, but not all metaphors are created equal.Some, like the information and code metaphors, are exceptionally potent due tothe richness of their symbolisms, their synchronic and diachronic linkages, andtheir scientific and cultural valences. (Kay 2000:2)

With information and code, not only does the work of metaphor become visiblein scientific discourse – monstrous enough – but in its richness and potency itexerts effects on the direction taken by that discourse. When analogies are takenas ontologies, a significant reshaping occurs. In the case of biochemical uses ofcode, “herediary material became informational, and the informational repre-sentations of the code were literally realized” (Kay 2000:7). Strangely, it iscatachresis that makes this possible. Kay argues that the “information catachre-sis”, as a “double metaphorical construction of information”, works productively,even inaugurally, “to validate the representation of the genetic code as natural,eternal, and universal writing”. The “slippagges, ambiguities, paradoxes, and lossof referentialities” create a space for the “scientific imaginary” and its projectionsof the “genomic book of life” (Kay 2000:34). Catachresis opens a space to be filled,its improper usage creating a new discipline, a hybrid formation composed ofinformation theory and biology. A similar pattern is evinced in the conceptualformation of philosophy. Contrasting metaphor and catachresis, Derrida notes thelatter’s foundational significance: where metaphor “generally implies a relation toan original ‘property’ of meaning, a ‘proper’ sense to which it indirectly orequivocally refers”, catachresis “is a violent production of meaning, an abusewhich refers to no anterior or proper norm. The founding concepts ofmetaphysics – logos, eidos, theoria, etc. are instances of catachresis rather thanmetaphors . . .” (1984:123). On the basis of an abuse of a figure of speech which issupposed to be merely decorative, an entire new science is born.

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Through catachresis, information theory transforms the scientific discipline thatuses it, in the process changing the focus and direction of that discourse. Inrealizing its metaphor, moreover, information in-forms and re-forms the nature ofthe reality it theorizes, ceasing to remain mere metaphor in the process. Theinformation metaphor works like the Derridean “supplement”: an extraneousterm, “smuggled in” to genetic representations ends up reconfiguring the wholesystem (Kay 2000:239). What is “tagged on”, decorative, analogical or heuristic,becomes central in reconfiguring a discipline: different conceptions and directionsare developed, new modes of practice and organization emerge, new patterns ofunderstanding, knowing, acting on and shaping reality become available.Moreover, it is as catachresis, as an inappropriate use or abuse of metaphor, thatcode operates so effectively and creatively: its richness suggests a host ofassociations and further analogies, a variety of new lines of research andexperimentation to be explored, all generated by the play of signification. Indeed,the fecund and productive effects of such an abuse of metaphor function, in theterms of information theory, like the negentropic noise that allows an open systemto develop complexity: the misuse of metaphor, in straying from predictable butinformationally poor associations, opens up new avenues for research that,though initially making little sense, are made to work. In engaging with thisnoise, as new and productive information, the system changes itself, reorganizingin more complex fashion around the innovations of metaphor. Catachresis, inwhich the deviations from propriety loose a host of monstrous figures, begins tocauses a mutation in discursive practice itself: for Hayles, again using informa-tional terms, mutation “names the bifurcation point at which the interplaybetween pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction”,marking “a rupture of pattern so extreme that the expectation of continuousreplication can no longer be sustained” (1999:33). In crossing the line betweenliterary and scientific discourse, between theory and practice, word and thing, therealization of metaphor begins to redraw the line itself.

Unmaking metaphor

With the catachresis caused by code metaphors, there is a hollowing out and re-filling of scientific discourse, an evaporation and reconfiguration centered oninformation theory that reshapes scientific practice and beyond. Questions ofcode and information, of linguistic and scriptural processes, form and context, ofmetaphorical abstractions and embodiments, proceed in two directions at once:they return to familiar models and differentiations (between word and thing,material and conceptual, actual and discursive) and simultaneously head towardsbarely imaginable formations where such distinctions no longer apply. Currentpositions on code and information fall between the second and third orders ofBaudrillard’s simulacra, that is between a productive nineteenth-century sym-bolic economy and the hyperreality of simulations. Discussing the “end ofdialectical evolution” in Chance and Necessity, Baudrillard argues that JacquesMonod’s position reflects “the ambiguity of all contemporary science”:

its discourse is directed at the code, that is, at third-order simulacra, but it stillfollows second-order “scientific” schemata such as objectivity, the scientific“ethic” of knowledge, the truth-principle and the transcendence of science, and so

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on. These things are incompatible with third-order models of indeterminacy.(Baudrillard 1983a:84)

The gap between orders of simulacra is also the locus where the in-determinacyof and in metaphor is visible: in modernity its proper place lies in literarylanguage, separated off from the transparency of scientific discourse. But incrossing that division it cedes to the work of simulations whose hyperrealityknows no such boundaries: if language is not a code, as Hayles, following Lacan,insists, stressing the polyphonic chains of abstracted and embodied flickeringsignifiers, and code is not a code, as Kay contends in discriminating ciphers frompolysemic language, then metaphor is not metaphor in its simultaneousinstitution and transversal of borders: its viral subversions, according toBaudrillard, evoke a metonymic, associative movement rather than a substitutive,metaphoric organization (1983b:7). This is the hyperreal play, the technopoiesis, inwhich esthetics, politics, sexuality, economics become confounded. Baudrillard’sinterrogation of metaphor stems from the shifts put into effect by code. Sexualitycedes to “genetic substitution” and its “linear and sequential reproduction,cloning, or parthenogenesis of little celibate machines”. The body, once “ametaphor of the soul” then “a metaphor for sex” is “no longer a metaphor foranything at all”. It is “merely the locus of metastasis, of the machine-likeconnections between all its processes, of an endless programming devoid of anysymbolic organization or overarching purpose”. The body forms the site of a“pure promiscuity” equivalent to that of circuits and networks (1993b:7).

Cybernetics crosses the gap between orders of simulacra, establishing itself asa mode of articulation and reconfiguration by instituting information as anoverall code defining contemporary hyperreal existence. In the indeterminacybetween orders that is marked by catachresis and technopoiesis, homogeneityand play, pattern and randomness, rapidly circulate in arbitrary and unanchoredfashion at the hollow heart of things, the very space where code inscribes itself asa new, in Kay’s words, “scriptural technology”. According to one of the less well-known figures of cybernetic research – Donald MacKay – information scienceprovided “a kind of bridging language, making possible the exchange of ideasbetween a large number of disciplines” (1961:26). Writing in 1961, MacKay, whoemphasized, against Shannon’s dominant (and prevailing) insistence on the formrather than the content of the signal, the role of semantics and context in thetransmission and reception of messages, underestimated the potency of informa-tional metaphors. The bridging language was in effect a new universal language(a code embracing language, computers and genes). Stressing form and notcontent, the abstraction of information from a material context enables it tobecome “free-floating” and thoroughly decontextualized, an empty form that isreadily exchangeable, transferrable and reproducible, and thus ideally suited tothe networks of new economic organization. Hayles identifies a new episteme atwork, one that transforms both bodies and representation:

the contemporary pressure toward dematerialization, understood as an epistemicshift toward pattern/randomness and away from presence and absence, affectshuman and textual bodies on two levels at once, as a change in the body (thematerial substrate) an as a change in the message (the codes of representation)(1999:29)

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Emptying body and nature as substance, leaves informational organization free tore-form and relocate identity and significance at an abstracted and decontextu-alized level.

Marshall McLuhan grasped the unifying and transformative significance of thenew technological arrangement in overcoming all linguistic divisions: “todaycomputers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code orlanguage into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises bytechnology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity”(1964:80). But the translation, occuring across codes and languages, has widerramifications. Playing on etymology (on meta and pherein meaning “to carryacross or transport”), McLuhan’s understanding of media is

concerned with all forms of transport of goods and information, both as metaphorand exchange. Each form of transport not only carries, but translates andtransforms, the sender, the receiver, and the message. The use of any kind ofmedium or extension of man alters the patterns of interdependence amongpeople, as it alters the ratios among our senses. (1964:89–90)

Code is thus much more than the scriptural technology that was language: it is acomplete technology combining an organizing framework or form of languageand the technical capacity to materialize or realize itself, thereby changing thingsin the world. Paul Rabinow has noted the transformative power enabled by the“postdisciplinary rationality” of genetic research when combined with theincreasing efficiency and accuracy of new technologies: “the object to be known– the human genome – will be known in such a way that it can be changed”(1992:236). He goes on: “representing and intervening, knowledge and power,understanding and reform, are built in, from the start, as simultaneous goals andmeans” (1992:236). Older distinctions are confounded and erased as the completetechnology of code inscribes itself in and as reality. For Rabinow, technoscienceheralds this possiblity: “nature will be known and remade through technique andwill finally become artificial, just as culture becomes natural. Were such a projectto be brought to fruition, it would stand as the basis for overcoming the nature/culture split” (1992:242). The move to a hyperreality of simulation, of course,marks such a moment in that it identifies the point at which, in the productionand inscription of images, the distinction between nature or reality and sign andrepresentation has been superseded. Kay underlines the point, drawing out theinterchanges that render conventional distinctions redundant:

When episteme and techne are seen as intertwined (thus rejecting the Greeklogocentric legacy), the time-honored dichotomies between theory and practice,discovery and intervention, and observer and phenomenon are blurred. Technol-ogy and theory generate each other; epistemic things become technical things andvice versa, as Hans-Jorg Rheinberger has shown. (2000:36)

Differences between word and thing, fiction or theory and reality are elided.Mastery lies in the technological control and implementation of the wordalone: “genomic biopower promises new levels of control over life through thepristine metalevel of information: through control of the word, or the DNAsequence” (Kay 2000:327). Where de Man’s metaphors or catachresis mayengender fanastically mutant figures in a poetic or linguistic realm, disturbing

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philosophical or empirical discourse, the monstrosities of code are increasinglyable to realize themselves.

In terms of information’s transformation and dematerialization of the humanbody, the realization of code initially requires an abstraction or dematerializationfrom a physical matrix. This redefines humanity, rendering it mobile, andsaleable: “when bodies are constituted as information, they can be not only soldbut fundamentally reconstituted in response to market pressures” (Hayles1999:42). Removed from any material stability, humans can be remade accordingto informational and economic principles. The freedom of the market that shapesthis process, is not, however, so free, as to be outside of mechanisms of control.Kay, indeed, is careful to point to the way that the reformulation of informationand biological sciences “reshaped the problem of genetic specificity through adiscourse that resonated with the technosciences of command and control” (Kay2000:150). Cybernetics, of course, developed out of wartime research. The newmilitary-corporate order, indeed, pioneered research into the Internet. But itsamorphous reach extends across the social sphere leading to what Kay calls a“geneticization of society” in which genetic information is “reconfiguring ournotions of self, health, and disease” (2000:327). Control, however, is simultane-ously uncontrollable: without material substrate, modes of judgment or heteroge-neous principles like morality or reason, its aims are defined by technologicalefficiency and economic performance. Determination and control, homogeniza-tion and order, must remain open to innovations and creations that may optimizeor enhance efficiency and performance, thereby depending on the aleatory andpotentially productive movements of indeterminacy and play.

The situation realized by genetic research and technological advance exem-plifies the condition identified by Lyotard as postmodern. The collapse of modernboundaries, the crisis in the categories defining modernity, open a space for theemergence of a hypermodern formation in which the technosciences – and theirimperatives to optimize and maximize performance – come to the fore. AsLyotard argues in his discussion of technoscientific language games andperformativity, the reality that served as the legitimation of modern science is nolonger in existence:

since “reality” is what provides the evidence used as proof in scientificargumentation, and also provides prescriptions and promises of a juridical,ethical, and political nature with results, one can master all of these games bymastering “reality”. That is precisely what technology can do. By reinforcingtechnology, one “reinforces” reality, and one’s chances of being just and rightincrease accordingly. (1984:47)

With the technological capacity to master reality, like the mastery – and rewriting– of nature and the body by genetics, the rules of the game have clearlychanged.

The technological capacity to literalize metaphor, a realization, Lyotard writes,“of the fantasy to seize reality”, forms the crucial difference between themetaphorical operations of modernity and the operational mode of hyper-modernity. Metaphors can now, it seems, literally realize themselves, rewritereality and realize, perhaps, the host of monstrous possibilities once onlymetaphorically imaginable as an abuse of (scientific) language and practice. Art

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and science, creation and monstrosity, are shifted on to another plane. Havingfinally divested nature of her secrets and erased any distinction between natureand culture, life can be regulated and transformed by technological criteria alone.The evacuation of any grounds of differentiation – be it moral, rational, utilitarian– leaves a space open for the projection and realization of any fantasy, for anyesthetics to make itself real. Poeisis finds itself aborbed within technoscientificpractice, the metaphors that empirical discourse attempted to hold at baybecoming bound up in its creative enterprise. Such technopoiesis, however, inorder to make and remake, to create and recreate, incorporates catachresis alongwith metaphor, the play of language coming to infuse its realizations with aninevitably monstrous potential.

Postscript: future passed

The development of genetic research, Kay suggests, offers a “genealogy of thefuture” (2000:328). For her, “genomic textuality had become a fact of life andcommercial futures, a metaphor literalized, with all the lumbering limits that thisconflation of analogy and ontology entails for textual and material mastery of the‘book of life’ ” (2000:331). The future for which genes provide a genealogyassumes a very different form from that which accompanied the metanarrativesof modernity. Its metaphors, too, undergo a transformation in which metaphoritself may be rendered redundant: a literal metaphor is, of course, an oxymoron.To literalize or realize a metaphor, then, is to cancel it out as metaphor, erasing itand the distinctions, of proper and improper usage, word and thing, fantasy andreality, on which it depends. A literal metaphor is a most monstrous metaphor, ametaphor that is not one, a misuse of metaphor that, unlike the abuse ofcatachresis, is utterly destructive. What replaces metaphor is a realm, ahyperrealm, of simulations oxymoronically engendering a circuit in which allmodern distinctions are effaced, all oppositions cancel each other out or becomeinterchangeable: metaphor and catachresis are realized on the same plane in thistechnopoiesis in which creation and monstrosity become indistinguishable. In theself-cancelling produced by its oxymoronic effects, the code that exemplifies thework of simulation confounds distinctions between nature and culture, analogyand ontology, episteme and techne, to leave neither one nor the other in their onceproper place. At the same time it supersedes both at once, incorporating themonto its peculiar nondialectical plane of immanence. Simulation, with its viral(cultural/biological) and transversal circulations, leaves no borders intact in itsunchecked crossings: metaphor, things, monsters, mutations are simply moresimulations in its indiscriminate, indifferent exchanges.

The genealogy of the future inscribed in genetic histories traces a past that ispassed, passed, that is, not by modernity’s linear narrative of events promisingprogress to come, but by an omnipresence of the present, a self-cancellationsymptomatic of the obliteration of differences. The future collapses on a presentthat recycles and overwrites the past as it erases metaphor and monstrosity. Once,the future assumed a monstrous form outside narrative and normality; it retainedan openness to uncertainty and the unknown. For Derrida,

the future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which canonly be surprising, that for which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded byspecies of monsters. A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future;

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it would already be predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow. Allexperience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome themonstrous arrivant . . . (1992:386)

In terms of genetics and information, the future of monsters and the monstrosityof the future are bound up together. When monsters are no longer monstrous, nolonger surprising or unpredictable, what of the future? When, indeed, monstersare designed or programed, all risks assessed and all tests and therapiesundertaken, can there be a glimpse of a future the otherness of which would holdany surprises at all? If the future is already prescripted in a “book of life” that canbe read and rewritten according to the imperatives of technoscientific military-corporate order, with all births and monstrosities coded on the same informa-tional plane as no more than simulations that are optimizations or enhancementsof prior simulations, then the future, like the metaphor of monstrosity itself,disappears on a horizon that is no more than a screen.

Perhaps, contemporary culture is already too hospitable to monsters, too readyto welcome their arrival, too prepared, too eager to anticipate the simulateddifference they may bring. Hence there is little left to engender surprise. In apresent overdetermined by the realization of older metaphors, the fate ofFrankenstein and his metaphorical genetic legacy exemplifies the condition oflving in the future passed. With Frankenstein old metaphors circulate readily,only exhumed, however, to ghost a context in which their significance hasdrastically altered. For Kay, the invocation of Faust provides an example ofFrankensteinian presumption: “if the genome stands for the origin of human life,then the Word – the DNA sequence – has brought molecular biologists as close tothe act of creation as could be experienced, involving supernatural, Faustianpowers” (2000:37). The dream of scientific mastery, however, has been realized innew creative potential. Discussing an article on human cloning written for theNew York Times in 1972, Turney notes that it ends with the observation thatFrankenstein is “no longer a fantasy”. Moreover, the article concludes, “in itsrealisation we no longer identify with Dr Frankenstein but with his monster”(1998:180). The return to old metaphors provides some comfort, dispelling fearsin giving recognizable form to new relationships, explaining developments theconsequences of which are difficult to apprehend, their implications barelythinkable. But the misrecognition that casts new relations in familiar forms alsoacknowledges a change: no longer are humans positioned on the side of scienceas it appropriates the secrets of life in the mastery of nature. Instead, identifyingwith the monster, humans are aligned with all that can be made and remade bya more than human technology.

Monsters once functioned to define the humanity invented by modernity, the“species of nonspecies” that differentiated the human from its others. Franken-stein’s monster, of course, was the one of the first to interrogate that relation. Themonstrous interrogation of the limits of human identity, however, steadily erodesthe difference; new biotechnologies render the distinction obsolete. In his“cyberpunk version” of Frankenstein, Bruce Sterling illustrates the changing rolesof monster, scientist – and human figure:

In this imaginary work, the Monster would likely be the well funded R&D team-project of some global corporation. The Monster might well wreak bloody havoc,most likely on random passers-by. But having done so, he would never have been

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allowed to wander to the North Pole, uttering Byronic profundities. The Monstersof cyberpunk never vanish so conveniently. They are already loose on the streets.They are next to us. Quite likely WE are them. The Monster would have beencopyrighted through new genetic laws, and maufactured world-wide in manythousands. Soon the Monsters would all have lousy night jobs mopping up atfast-food restaurants . . . This “anti-humanist” conviction in cyberpunk is notsome literary stunt to outrage the bourgeiosie; this is an objective fact aboutculture in the late twentieth century. Cyberpunk didn’t invent this situation; it justreflects it . . . Jump-starting Mary Shelley’s corpses is the least of our problems;something much along that line happens in intensive-care wards every day.(1991:101)

With Research and Development teams becoming protagonists, Sterling’s versionhas monsters fully incorporated, no longer Romantic exception or excess, butpervasive, banal and thoroughly recognizable figures. Monsters, indeed, are bothour neighbors and ourselves, and, at the same time, mass-produced drones, wageslaves without prospects in the minimum pay sector of the service industry. Nomore than a fact of life, monsters are no longer an issue, their appearance asroutine as operations performed daily in hospitals around the world to bring thedead back to life. Monsters, then, are the norm, familiar daily monstrositiesextending from the floor cleaner to the patient wired up on the operating table,just variants of all the everyday folk who are prostheticized, surgically,cosmetically, chemically or, even, genetically (Clarke 2002:40). In a more banalfashion, “high-tech Frankenstein”, in another elison of creator and monster, is “afigure for for the relation of humans online to machines” (Poster 2002:29–30).

Monsters no longer render norms visible; they are the norm. Their modernfunction as unrecognizable figures evoking an awareness of norms, limits andtransgressions, becomes redundant. In the process, of course, an extensivenormalization occupies the horizon, an incorporation and assimilation ofotherness that leaves little room for disturbing differences of any kind, ahomogenization, a normalization in which norms have no limit nor boundary, normeaning. In a discussion of the “taxonomic disorder” of hybrids in theory,Derrida introduces an important, even impossible, distinction between anoxymoronic “normal monstrosity” and a tautological “monstrous monstrosity”.The former includes theories which happily incorporate numerous elements ofother theories or, in opposition, strategies of criticism which misrepresent andreduce the claims of radically disturbing modes of writing (like deconstructionitself) with caricatured dismissals. As usual, monsters are to be put down,monstered by legitimate positions. “Monstrous monstrosities” retain the olderaspect of monsters, unpresentable, unrecognizable, unpredictable. They have a“formless form” beyond anticipation, recognition and legitimacy; they cannot beprogramed or presented as such: “Monsters cannot be announced. One cannotsay: ‘Here are our monsters’, without immediately turning the monsters intopets” (1990:80).

Our monsters, our pets. Our pets, ourselves. Normal monstrosity becomes thequotidien condition of hypermodernity. Monsters are everywhere and everyone.To be overfamiliar with monsters is to misrecognize the possibility of themonstrous. If a faint trace of monstrous monstrosity lurks in the generalnormalization of normal monstrosity, it is perhaps a sign, not of a new andsingular birth, nor of some terrible event about to happen, but registers the

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absence of a future. This absence, however, provides the screen for the projectionof a desire for a difference that will be unpredictable and surprising, a change thatwill betoken the possibility of a future. Hence monstrous monstrosity is soughtout and misrecognized, eagerly anticipated and prepared for, so, when somethingappears, it is too readily seized upon, already too familiar, and thus quicklynormalized as monster: if its possibility exists at all, the monstrous lies someplaceother than where one expects to find it. And with so many screens embracinggenes, images, information, and life in all its virtuality, it may be necessary to(not) look somewhere else.

Notes

1. Stephen Jay Gould’s (1997) level-headed account of Frankenstein makes more carefuldiscriminations between science, film and fiction and appears less anxious about theeffects of fiction on the perception of scientific theory and practice. In contrast toWolpert, Shelley does not get the blame: her fiction provides support for a balancedview of scientific debates in the way that it seems to articulate biological determinismand cultural development, “melding the themes of inborn predisposition and shapingthrough life’s experiences” (1997:60). Hollywood, however, receives sharp criticism forits reduction of science to “only one theme”: “human technology must not go beyondan intended order decreed by God or set by nature’s laws. No matter how benevolentthe purposes of the transgressor, such cosmic arrogance can only lead to killer tomatoes,very large rabbits with sharp teeth, giant ants in the Los Angeles sewers or even largerblobs that swallow entire cities as they grow” (53). Literature is far sublter and nuancedin its handling of such themes, Frankenstein being “neither a diatribe on the dangers oftechnology nor a warning about overextended ambition against a natural order” (54).Indeed, citing Waldman from the novel, Gould notes how the “awesome power ofscience” is presented in a “not negative” fashion. While any endeavor, not science alone,may produce monstrous results, Gould finds Frankenstein “entirely idealistic” in hisapproach before identifying his “moral failing” (54–5). This appears in his uncaringrejection of his creation for reasons of “literal superficiality” (58). The monster isugly.

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Fred Botting is Professor of Literature at Keele University. He is the author ofmany books, the most recent being Sex, Machines and Navels.

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