Cybergenetics. Life in the Control Loop

Abstract

In 1948, Norbert Wiener presented Cybernetics as a “word invented to define a new field of science”, which would strive to understand the functioning of “control and communication in machines and living organisms”. From a cybernetic perspective, the living body was conceived as a “cybernetic system” interacting with its environment through continuous feedback loops. Understanding how these information loops function has thus become the key to understand how living systems adapt and persist in global environments mutating ever more rapidly. For a growing number of biologists, the loop has emerged as a “universal symbol of how life works at all of its scales and levels”. The cybernetic loop, however, is not only an epistemological figure (through which life is being thought in striking new ways); it is also a technology of power, projecting new ways of governing and directing living process at multiple scales. Cybernetics has recently given rise to cybergenetics: a new area of research aimed at “synthetically regulating cellular processes at the gene level”. Focusing on the recent history of this emerging discipline, we consider how the confluence of cybernetic theories, genome sequencing machines, targeted mutagenic techniques, and artificial intelligence is informing new conceptions of molecular life and speculative futures of biopolitical control.