Artificial Life in a Neo-Biological Age examines the construction, manipulation and re-definition of life in contemporary techno-scientific culture. It takes a critical political view of the concept of life as information, tracing this through the new biology and the discourse of genomics as well as through the
changing discipline of artificial life and its manifestation in art, language, literature, commerce and entertainment.

From cloning to computer games, and incorporating an analysis of hardware, software and 'wetware', Sarah Kember extends current understanding by demonstrating the ways in which this relatively marginal field connects with, and connects up global networks of information and communication systems characterised, increasingly, by claims to autonomy, agency and evolvability.

From a feminist perspective, and with a set of concerns related to the role of the body, the self and the species in the production of life-as-it-could-be, the argument turns on the realisation that resistance is futile. Artificial life (ALife) is, in part, an adaptation to the climate of opposition surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In ALife, as elsewhere, the meanings of reductionism and determinism, transcendence and disembodiment are complex and internally contested. The strategy for change advocated here, therefore, rests on dialogue and on risk where risk entails the renunciation of rhetorics based on the redundant distinction between nature and culture: science and humanities; essentialism and constructivism; ontology and epistemology. In this way, debates on artificial life are directed beyond the science wars.

There is also the emergence of posthumanism; an ethics of the posthuman subject mobilised in the tension between cold war and post-cold war politics, psychological and biological machines, centralised and de-centralised control, top-down and bottom-up processing, autonomous and autopoietic organisms, cloning and transgenesis, species-self and other species.

In literary and critical theory, posthumanism, meaning beyond humanism, is the dominant European rational, secular philosophy. It transcends the ideas and images of the world of classical Renaissance humanism to correspond more closely to the 21st century's ideas of scientific knowledge. It mainly differentiates from classical humanism in that it restores the stature that had been made of humanity to one of many natural species.

According to this claim, humans have no inherent rights to destroy nature or set themselves above it in ethical considerations a priori.

Human knowledge is also reduced to a less controlling position, previously seen as the defining aspect of the world. The limitations and fallibility of human intelligence are confessed, even though that doesn't mean abandoning the strong rational tradition of humanism.

Performance philosopher, Shannon Bell, argues that posthumanism attempts 'to develop through enactment new understandings of the self and other, essence, consciousness, intelligence, reason, agency, intimacy, life, embodiment, identity and the body'.

Concluded.

* Contributed by -
Ramkumar S.,
Currently student of PGP-I at BIM, Trichy,
Article published in KRIYA, September'06 Issue, the monthly magazine of the institute.