Molecular Red by Mckenzie Wark

Author:Mckenzie Wark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Ideology, as Bogdanov well knew, is productive. The shift from thinking organization as energy systems alone—as Bogdanov himself does—to thinking in terms of a combination of energy and information systems, enables not only new kinds of science, technology, and power, but also opens up a space for their critique.

Interestingly, some of the new modes of substitution producing both ideology and knowledge might no longer be metaphorical so much as algorithmic. Haraway sees in genetic code and computer code a new kind of fetishism that is partly, but not entirely, legible to the old Marxist and Freudian versions.58 One might call it the fetish of the program, a new kind of code causality, of which gene causality is but one instance. It is not entirely reducible to either authoritarian or exchange causality, although it has features of both. It is certainly not the comradely causal universe that Bogdanov and Platonov imagined.

By way of illustration, Haraway points to an issue of Mammalian Genome, which offered its readers a representation of the contents of the chromosomes of a mouse under the headline, “the Complete Mouse (some assembly required).”59 Code becomes the master layer in the stacked protocols by which an organization is managed. In genetics, code becomes the part via which a whole can be reductively understood. In place of messy flesh, the clean execution of command and control, although as we shall see there are code-based sciences where such a reduction is not easily made.

Commodity fetishism occurs when relations between people take on the features of relations between things. The formula for the fetish Lukács offers is caught in a prior distinction between object and subject, even if this distinction appears in a more sophisticated form. Collective labor is what hides behind the commodity. But perhaps it is not so easy to separate labor and thing. So Haraway, like Bogdanov, wants to broaden the fetish concept a little. “Curiously, fetishes—themselves ‘substitutes’, that is, tropes of a special kind—produce a particular ‘mistake’; fetishes obscure the constitutive tropic nature of themselves and of worlds.”60 A fetish is a naturalizing of the very thing whose “nature” needs calling into question, but while it may be limiting, it may nevertheless be peculiarly productive: “There are amazingly creative aspects to commodity fetishism.”61

Gene technology is implicated in commodity fetishism, but maybe also in “another and obliquely related flavor of reification that transmutes material, contingent, human and nonhuman liveliness into maps of life itself and then mistakes the map and its reified entities for the bumptious, nonliteral world.”62 Haraway’s détournement of the fetish repurposes it. Rather than the commodity fetish, she asks about the corporeal fetish. How do bodies appear as autonomous things against a background of invisible non-bodies? In commodity fetishism, the apparent world of things, governed by the code of exchange value, obscures social relations among people and the production of use value. In corporeal fetishism, the apparent world of bodies, governed by the code of the gene, obscures the tangle of both human and nonhuman processes that produce life.

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