What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies

Abstract

What is life? A gathering consensus in anthropology, science studies, and philosophy of biology suggests that the theoretical object of biology, “life,” is today in transformation, if not dissolution. Proliferating reproductive technologies, along with genomic reshufflings of biomatter in such practices as cloning, have unwound the facts of life.1 Biotechnology, biodiversity, bioprospecting, biosecurity, biotransfer, and molecularized biopolitics draw novel lines of property and protection around organisms and their elements.2 From cultural theorists and historians of science we learn that life itself, consolidated as the object of biology around 1800, has morphed as material components of living things—cells and genes—that are rearranged and dispersed, and frozen, amplified, and exchanged within and across laboratories.3 Writers in philosophy, rhetoric, and cultural studies, meanwhile, claim that, as life has become the target of digital simulation and bioinformatic representation, it has become virtual, mediated, and multiple.4