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With the shock and awe that comes with any talk of
biosynthetic innovation, Id like to raise a cautionary fag:
are we indeed about to enter a brave new world a
thought that has been the motto for the human, as such,
for about fve hundred years? The concept of next
nature precisely (though unconsciously) states the para-
dox: what is being thought here is simply a new and im-
proved version of the same old thing, a repetition. How
well has that been working out for the last two hundred
years, namely since the inception of the Anthropocene?
The Anthropocene, in case we need reminding, is the
radical intersection of human and geological time that
began with the inception of the steam engine in the late
eighteenth century. Since then, humans have deposited
a layer of carbon in Earths crust that is now found in
deep lakes and within Arctic ice. The term Anthropocene
was recently ratifed by an international consortium
of geologists.
Before I suture gizmos to my fesh, I think a re-
examination of what being human is this actual entity,
called homo sapiens is in order. Especially in light of
the fact that knowledge now operates on a 100,000-year
time scale (the amortization rate of global warming), well
beyond the efcacy of a fuorescent tree. On the other
hand, the knee-jerk reaction against the biosyn thetic is
just as problematic, though one can surely understand
the impulse. It is the impulse of the Luddite, who quite
realistically decides that the best frst response to a
machine that can take over her livelihood is to attempt
to destroy it. The reaction is problematic, because I do
not want to go down the rabbit hole we have already
gone down the rabbit hole called modernity, which is
marked by industry on the one hand, and philosophies
that swim in the wake of Hume and Kant on the other.
This essay will all too briefy work out a map for a possible
space that includes more than simply accepting or bluntly
denying biosynthesis, which is just the culmination of a
certain trajectory of modernity.
We know that humans are symbiotic kluges
of humans and nonhumans this is not a new idea. In a
sense all life is a kind of biosynthesis. Thus this essay
will by no means be a cry of nature in a denatured world.
Life already is artifcial life, as any glance at a biology
textbook will show you.
But what is less well accepted is that ideas in
(human) minds are also like that. Scholarship should be
about studying the DNA of ideas. An idea is a virus, from
a certain point of view: it cannot reproduce on its own,
and needs a (human) mind to do so. Fig. 01 Humans
are vectors for idea viruses. An ideas phenomenological
structure is independent of the mind that is having it.
We know this since the other way of thinking that ideas
are simply produced by minds or brains, as symptoms
of them, as it were involves an infnite regress. The as-
sertion that a thought is a squeezing of the brain, for
instance, must itself be on its own terms a squeezing of
the brain. Thus psychologism, a view that logic is simply
the rules for how a healthy brain functions, becomes
unable to think at all, since now we must defne what
a healthy brain is, and for that we need logical assertions
that are brain squeezings, and so on.
1
Thus an idea has
an inner logical structure that is not dependent on the
mind or brain that is having it.
The question then becomes, how do humans (and
others with minds) become susceptible to ideas? How
do we become their vectors? In a similar way we are
vectors for built objects such as chairs, and presumably
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Fig. 01 Like an idea or a tool, such as a chair or
a bioengineered plant, a virus is an entity
that requires another entity to reproduce.
Represented here is the Rhinovirus
(common cold).
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r
biosynthesis, isnt what is being warded of pre cisely
this: that things do not (and cannot) coincide with their
phenomena? What is being warded of, then, is Humes
devastation of scholastic metaphysics with its pre-given
clunking cogwheels of causality; and Kants deeply dis-
turbing grounding of Hume in an irreducible phenomenon-
thing gap. Since a fuorescent lamp does not coincide
with its phenomena, I can make one out of a tree. There
is nothing about a tree that makes this impossible.
However, a tree is just tree-like: a tree is not a popsicle.
Yet since there is a gap between phenomenon and thing,
I can imagine making a tree-favored popsicle, or a tree
that grows popsicles.
Here is the trouble: the happy nihilism of I can
make anything out of anything is covering over a more
disturbing truth opened up by the philosophy that
happens at the start of the Anthropocene. What is this
happy nihilism covering over? It obscures precisely
the way in which Hume and Kant have opened up a world
of nothingness. The diference between a tree and a
fuorescent lamp is not absolutely nothing at all. Rather,
there is an uncanny gap between the tree as thing and
the tree as phenomenon. I cannot locate this gap any-
where in ontically-given, phenomenal space. I feel rain-
drops. They are not gumdrops, mores the pity. They
are raindroppy their phenomena are measurably to do
with themselves. But I cant access the actual raindrops.
Their phenomena are not raindrops. There is a funda-
mental, irreducible gap between the raindrop phenomenon
and the raindrop thing. But it is worse than that. I cannot
locate where this gap is anywhere in my given, phe nom-
enal, experiential, or indeed scientifc space. Things do
not come with little dotted lines and drawings of scissors
telling me where their phenomena stop and their real
thing-ness starts.
5
There is a gap, but I cant fnd it.
The best term for this is nothingness, by which I mean
meontic nothing (from the Greek me

, nothing). A
meontic nothing is not absolutely nothing at all that
would be the not even nothing that some call oukontic
(from the Greek ou, non- or not). By contrast,
meontic nothing or nothingness is a strange fickering
distortion, a something that is nothing, a quality or
ness of nothing: nothing-ing, or nihilation.
6

Isnt this nothingness the truth of Darwin, of Marx,
of discoveries of climate phenomena such as El Nio?
I can compute evolution, capital, and El Nio, but I cant
see or touch them. All I see when I try to fnd evolution
are cats, bacteria, and sponges. Yet when I examine them,
I fnd that sponges are not sponges, but rather kluges
of things that arent sponges, such as DNA and RNA,
which are themselves kluges, and so on. Lifeforms
in a Darwinian context just are fuzzy sets of things that
contain members that arent members of them. They
are contradictory entities and so it would be logical,
according to an old (now defunct, I claim) Aristotelian
thought-virus to assert that there are no lifeforms. So
I can turn a tree into a lamp, and this has various benefts,
but one beneft is that it leaves the old Aristotelian
(that is, totally antiquated) logic in place. I can turn a tree
into a lamp, because there are no trees. Thus I do not
have to cope with the idea that trees exist because they
are also not-trees.
It is as if the machination of biosynthesis promises
to get rid of this disturbing gap, with its attendant
dialethias (things that are contradictory and true at the
same time, like trees) through a strategy of proving
the gap wrong by making more and more things out of
for other things that we might make, such as biosyn thetic
entities. We know that things like chairs are not always
benign indeed, humans are vectors for all kinds of
objects that dont do us any good at all and chairs would
be quite high on my list of such objects. As we proceed,
we shall see that the thought of biosynthesis is con tam-
inated with a very old, very virulent, and very archaic
thought-virus: the Law of Noncontradiction, a law that
derives from Section Gamma of Aristotles Metaphysics.
We will see that human and nonhuman history (that is,
ecological polity) is now up against a limit at which this
law is now breaking down under the strain of modernity.
And we will see why it matters.
Now the biosynthetic paradigm is suggesting that
we integrate our bodies to a greater extent with non human
entities. First of all, isnt it clear from the preceding brief
analysis that this has always been the case? What is
so new about it apart from its assertion of radical new-
ness? In the second place, before we rush pell-mell into
a utopian idea-and-thing fu party, in which we expose
ourselves joyfully to all kinds of viruses, isnt it worth
thinking about what kinds of virus we might like to catch?
The assertion of radical newness is called mo der-
nity. Modernity produces statements such as: We are
now in a totally new historical moment. Or I am now
talking to you from a viewpoint outside of philosophy
or metaphysics. Modernity is what begins in the later
eighteenth century, in a forked emergence. The frst prong
of the fork is the acceleration of industrial agri culture
into the Industrial Revolution, in which machines are able
to make other machines, thus creating an emergent layer
of machinic being above the human (and bio log ical
nonhuman) worlds.
2
This emergence is, as Marx argues,
enabled by the steam engine, whose patent in 1784 spec-
ifed that it did not have a specifc purpose. This gener-
ality is very signifcant. A steam engine can be plugged
into a train, or a gigantic hammer, or a power loom. (I use
the term gigantic throughout this essay to evoke the
somewhat nonhuman scale of computation itself and
the industrial and technical phenomena of modernity.)
It humiliates the human insofar as it not only produces
hammers that can hammer gigantic bolts incapable of
being hammered by humans, but (and more eerily) it can
enable the same Cyclopean hammer to tap a tiny nail
into a soft piece of wood, as Marx puts it.
3
These entities
show that even activities we took to be exclusively human
are not. Again, I am not arguing that we return to a pure
world of nature or the human, a world that never existed.
The steam engine of 1784 is also the instigator
of the Anthropocene. Paul Crutzen, the atmospheric
chemist who coined the term Anthropocene, states this
in all his initial arguments about this geological period.
4

Surely the generality of this machine, which I can plug
into a power hammer or a power loom, is precisely what
makes it the defning organ of the Anthropocene. The
steam engine could be used to power Charles Babbages
Diference Engine, as he wanted. And a computer is just
a more general machine still, a machine that can pretend
to be any other device: a diary, a calculator, a piece of
paper and pen.
And isnt this the logical condition of possibility for
biosynthesis? I can grow a tree that pretends to be a
lamp. I can make a cell that pretends to be an antibiotic.
And so on. (And of course I need gigantic technical
apparatuses and gigantic computational machinery to
achieve fuorescent trees so I need things like steam
engines to supply the energy. When we get anxious about
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it was called Romanticism. Romanticism is a desperate
attempt to wake up from the picturesque dream that
brings about modernity. In the words of one scholar the
geologists hammer came to bear on the picturesque
Claude Glass.
10
Yet the supposedly post-Romantic atti-
tude that we must simply accept whatever biosynthetics
stand for is a regression from what was already fgured
out in the later eighteenth century.
If going forward really means going forward, we
must think some way of getting out of this loop, which
is just the Anthropocene in philosophical and aesthetic
form. What is disturbing about the idea of biosynthesis
is not that it gets rid of good old humans or nature. What
is disturbing is precisely the lack of disturbance, the
continuation of the happy nihilism of noncontradiction
by any means necessary.
1 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, tr. J.N. Findlay,
ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2006) 1.275276, 2.95,
9899, 100104, 110111.
2 Karl Marx, Capital, tr. Ben Fowkes, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1976, 1990), 1.496497, 499.
3 Marx, Capital 1.508.
4 Paul Crutzen and E. Stoermer, The Anthropocene, Global
Change Newsletter 41.1 (2000), 1718; Paul Crutzen, Geology
of Mankind, Nature 415 (6867) (2002), 23.
5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith
(Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 1965), 8485.
6 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology 1 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1951), 188.
7 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 51.
8 http://www.zeri.org/ZERI/The_Blue_Economy.html,
acessed February 14, 2013. http://www.nextnature.net,
accessed February 14, 2013.
9 Terry Gilliam, Dir., 12 Monkeys (Universal Pictures, 1995).
10 Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environ-
mental Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 45.
anything at all. But neither computational nor technical
strategy can get rid of reason. It will only shufe the
pieces around in a diferent way. And I already know that
there is a gap between computation and technics, and
reason as such: I can count, but when I try to show you
a number, I cant and must resort to counting yet a
number is a logical precondition of counting. There is an
irreducible gap.
7
So my computation and machination
just keeps on reinforcing the gap that I am trying to get
rid of, as we know from Cantor and Gdel, who showed
us the way computation cant help but open up even
more gaps in the very attempt to close the gap.
Isnt this desperation acknowledged, albeit tacitly,
in the gigantic lists favored by next nature rhetoric?
I am thinking of the one hundred case studies on the Zeri
website, and the endless-seeming posts of next natural
phenomena on nextnature.net.
8
Or consider the call
for papers for this volume: Gone are the days of blunt
engineering as a means of total control; concrete dams
and electro-shock therapy; today science is moving us
deeper into the nano-world of microchips and molecules,
where new more refned forms of control are possible,
where organic processes can be mimicked, modifed, and
augmented. In this new biosynthetic world, lumi nes cent
trees will light our sidewalks, massive oyster beds
will defend us from the foods, and hacked Lyre birds will
broadcast the radio. The very enormity of the lists
is a symptom of the impotence of computation to close
the phenomenonthing gap.
The problem is precisely not how to have respon-
sibility for this brave new world. The problem is whether
this is a new world at all. The problem is whether happy
nihilism succeeds in covering over the darker and more
intimate nihilism in which a tree is already not a tree,
whether we make it into a lamp or not. The answering
is a resounding no.
Happy nihilism is simply a continuation of the blunt
technics of earlier phases of modernity: engineering
rather than fully understanding. To learn how to cope
with a greater biosynthetic world must be distinguished
from the desire to usher in that world or the modernity
that thinks it has just woken up from the stasis of pre-
history. Otherwise it is precisely not coping with biosyn-
thetic things, but instead allowing them to reproduce
wildly, both inside and outside our heads. On this view,
only two attitudes are available. The frst is total despair,
and the second is a sadistic rubbernecking of the
triumph of the fuorescent trees the two attitudes are
really the same attitude, encapsulated in the look on the
face of Dr. Peters, the scientist in 12 Monkeys (played
by David Morse) who at the end, allows the security
guard to open the vial containing the virus that will wipe
out mankind.
9
The look on his face, of contemplative
horror and amusement, is the only look permitted in a
reality in which we simply accept biosynthetics. This is
not coping with them. What is required is an encounter
with the dark, intimate nihilism that leaks out of the
phenomenonthing gap.
Happy nihilism is simply the old attitude of watch-
ing Nature unfold, like a picturesque sunset the attitude
of aesthetic contemplation of preprogrammed agri-
cultural space that was the condition of possibility for
modernity as such. It is simply this old thought-virus,
with some slight upgrades to make it, once again, freshly
attractive, that is, to render humans freshly susceptible
to it. At the very start of the Anthropocene, an art move-
ment arose that tried to smash this aesthetic dis tance: