TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

Initiation

This meditation starts somewhere between the gene and the cell, at the moment of mutation. It is born out of a conspiracy between genes and triggers a shift in the functional role of the cell. At the extreme (through many stages, overtaking more and more old cells and producing countless new, altered ones) it forms a tumour, becomes cancer, and eventually dies. But let’s not go that far just yet. Let’s pause at the beginning. Science has given us many models for how an ordinary somatic cell turns into an unstoppable machine of expansion, forming new, alien, and non-functional tissues that fall outside the homeostatic regulation of the organism. This could be a story of ascension, in which a failure in the DNA sequence leads to an overexpression of ‘malignant’ genes, with them gaining control over cellular processes and thus granting the cell new capabilities.¹ It could be a story of downfall, in which the same failure weakens ‘friendly’ tumour-suppressor genes, thereby compromising the cell.² It could be a story of invasion, in which various external factors, like radiation or viruses, instead of altering the genetic code disrupt the coordinated work of gene expression, the translation of genetic material into tissue.³ This could also be a story of discord, no longer between genes, but between cells that mirror the body’s ‘natural’ hierarchy and create their own rogue organ-like tissue with no organismic purpose.⁴

All these models create different dramaturgies, each in its own way filling in the gap between normal and abnormal states of the cell, between a dormant cancer and a nascent one. Yet none of them advances us toward the key component of the entire tragedy: the beginning, in which we remain suspended, the moment of mutation. Not some arbitrary one, but that very mutation, the specific shift that (regardless of how complex its path may be) triggers the malignant process. Science doesn’t think this shift through; rather it introduces it operationally, as a carcinogenic deus ex machina. The following is an attempt to excise this moment, while also returning flesh (and what could be more fleshly than a malignant tumour) to a rather old problem that used to have many other names: clinamen, arche, event, anti-production…

Promotion

Modern biopolitics⁵ has undergone a series of complications. This is a double complication: it concerns both poles of the term: life and politics. The development of medical and digital technologies, the spread of hybrid modes of existence, coupled with increasingly extreme methods of giving life in clinics and laboratories or taking it away (granting death) in modern wars, ‘changes what it is to be biological.’⁶

When we speak of political life, that is, one conservable, observable, killable, we can no longer rely on a single, human form of life (bios). In fact, it is already difficult to speak of any form at all: ‘the object of politics is no longer a ‘life form’, its own specific way of being, but rather, life itself: all life and only life, in its mere biological reality’⁷ . The way life is observed and lived ‘undoes any clear-cut distinctions between living and dying’⁸, species and form, human and non-human. The practices of life/death and the theories that interpret them reveal within the bios of biopolitics a teeming multitude of prefixes: it is also zoe- and necropolitics. States of life that elude classical (human) biopolitics: the non-human and non-political, the excluded and therefore monstrous life (zoe)⁹, the ‘living dead’,¹⁰ all emerge and manifest themselves as an independent political force. Once interpreted as mere links in the apparatus of biopolitics,¹¹ whose key object remained human populations, they now form their own mortal and feral¹² worlds, where oxygen is shut off for the familiar but made available to the alien: to non-human, inhuman, post-human forms of life.

Moreover, the apparatus of modern biopolitics has been augmented with more sophisticated technologies. The method of moderating the endlessly multiplying aggregate states of the living has changed: it is no longer discipline, but control.¹³ The latter is not tied to any givenness of the (human) body, which becomes politicised by entering the field of disciplinary institutions and undergoing further processing. In fact, the modern body, as a bearer of life, has never really left the closed circuit of biopower. That’s because it wasn’t so much produced as it was re-produced in a specific configuration. The body is not a unit of the living, but its architecture, understood as its formation, is the key aspect of biopolitics. The focus shifts from the molar to the molecular level: politics is carried out by various swarms of molecules and micro-bodies,¹⁴ which pharmaceuticals populate us with from birth. There, between commanding and obeying molecules, takes place the true governance of life: even before any ‘self,’ even before any coherent biological presence as a human individual. Power is not outside, but within us, and ‘we’ are its result. It doesn’t matter how strange or mutant a body each particular form of life produces, at the molecular level, any queerness achieves the degree of standardisation necessary for control, since it is a molecular architecture analogous to that of a white cisgender man.

This complex structure, however, lacks a certain interval: that zone where life, whose boundaries are more blurred than ever, intertwines with the endlessly advancing technologies of politics. Why do the aforementioned complications of the two poles of biopolitics still preserve their biopolitical-ness, rather than falling apart into two separate domains? Why do we still speak of their hybrid, of biopolitics? My answer is protocol.¹⁵ Protocol is the technology capable of proceeding into the most desolate reaches of life and into its smallest scales. Protocols are everywhere: digital protocols like TCP/IP, Ethernet (and others), which gave us the Internet; treatment protocols that guide most modern therapies. Protocols govern dosage and application methods, protocols shape the radius and engraving of pills, the absorption and action of active ingredients, the interaction of substances with the body’s cells. Protocol is the connective tissue, the glue that binds together the infinite prefixes of biopolitics. It turns biopolitics into the power of sequence: of linking words, bodies, molecules, bits of data. The power of a specific (not just any, but this very) sequence. This true biopower, as I intend to argue, does not only preserve the coherence of the apparatus for managing life across all scales and territories. Moreover, since the incursion of pharmaceutical protocols into the architecture of the body occurs on the territory of already operant cellular protocols (protocols for arranging genetic sequences, expression, division, and death) we gain the opportunity to radically interpret biopolitics as post-biopolitics: as something that existed long before and without the human. It existed as something intracellular, even intragenetic, as soon as the simplest nucleotide sequences began to take shape.

Progression

A carcinogenic mutation triggers a chain of disruptions in the most essential cellular protocols.¹⁶ First, the apoptosis protocol, programmed cellular self-destruction, is taken out. Normal cell function is governed by the Hayflick limit: the maximum number of divisions a cell can undergo before it must die. Somatic cell death is necessary for the organism to maintain a stable DNA sequence and avoid a large number of replication errors that are inevitable during cell division. Each division of a somatic cell shortens its telomeres, the stretches of DNA at the ends of chromosomes. Once the telomere is exhausted, the cell is removed from the body’s architecture.

However, the mutated somatic cell stages a revolution: it activates its dormant telomerase, an enzyme that can indefinitely elongate telomeres, thereby granting itself immortality. This immortalised cell, having unleashed uncontrolled self-replication, accumulates errors that eventually undermine the selection processes responsible for eliminating altered, potentially dangerous cells. This occurs via immunoediting, the suspension of the immune surveillance protocol. Through successive stages, the cluster of mutated cells evades emergency destruction by the cells of the immune system. Having overrun the immune outpost, the tumour then disrupts the angiogenesis protocol: cancer cells reconfigure the network of blood vessels, diverting massive amounts of the body’s energy toward the uncontrollably growing mass. This sequence of cellular protocol failures ultimately shuts down the organism’s key (albeit somewhat idealised) protocol: that of homeostasis. The energy diverted to the tumour creates significant asymmetry in metabolic cycles. Balance and regulation, no matter how illusory their ‘normal’ to a tumour-free body in modern medicine, can no longer serve even as a model. Having disrupted its own sustenance, the weakened organism becomes defenceless against the further spread of mutated cells and their invasion into other tissues. Metastases transform a single lesion into a series of molecular uprisings against the body’s coercive regulatory protocols.

Transformation

Allow me to perform a blasphemous reduction and reduce all the metaphorical enrichment and complication in contemporary biopolitics, the endless multiplication of its prefixes, the inexhaustible heterogeneity of its controls, to a single protocol. Roberto Esposito¹⁷ helps us take the first step in this direction. His project frames biopolitics as a complex metaphorical system built on the intermixing of metaphors from its two domains, biology and politics. According to Esposito, reflections on biopolitics have always started from the fact of this mixing, yet have never attempted to fill the ‘intervals’, the ‘voids’ that make it possible. Meanwhile, the dual citizenship of these metaphors, the organic whole that is biopolitics, can exist only if they themselves possess a specific biopolitical character. The poles of biopolitics are not merely connected but ‘overlapped’: grafted into an organic whole (body, flesh) by a ‘third term’, ‘carnal difference’ (chiasm, ϰ).¹⁸ Biopolitics is bio(ϰ)politics. A meta-metaphor exists that ‘fills that semantic void, that interval of meaning which remains open in Foucault’s text between the constitutive poles of the concept of biopolitics, namely, biology and politics.’¹⁹ It is this meta-metaphor that makes any sensible separation of said poles problematic.²⁰

Esposito assigns this role to ‘the paradigm of immunisation’.²¹ This paradigm not only relates bios and nomos, the life and the political, but, since ‘immunity is the power to preserve life’,²² it establishes a specific dialectic, a chiasm between the two. Immunity is the protocol that regulates the assimilation of metaphors from the other domain and their migration. The key example of its operation is the metaphor of the body itself: once central in the lexicon of political philosophy, on its way out it ‘has been immunised rather than replaced’.²³ In other words, it was struck out while preserving its metaphorical potency; it was subjected to an excluding inclusion.²⁴ The immunisation protocol is the necessary condition for metaphorical homeostasis (understood energetically)²⁵ within the flesh of biopolitics. The immune dialectic of the ‘excluding inclusion’, harkening to a specific reading of negativity and affirmation, constitutes energetic balance, a homeostasis in its purest form.²⁶

Now I would like to go further, inside this fleshy harmony, suspecting that the immune paradigm of biopolitics has from the very start been the result of immunoediting. Then the chiasm at the body of biopolitics is the consequence of an imbalance, an asymmetry, caused by the presence of a malignant tumour in the immunological model of bio(ϰ)politics.²⁷ To uncover this tumour, we must employ Occam’s razor, wielding it as a scalpel for a single task: excising the first part of the word ‘biopolitics’, bios. Bios, which, as we have seen above, has quite chimerically spread into all possible states of life. To start elucidating my intention, we first need to restore the traditional accentuation of the word βίος. We restore it in order to then shift it: shift it to βιός. These two words, βίος and βιός, are linked not only by homography.²⁸ They form a chiasm in Heraclitus’s lines as ‘the problem of ἁρμονία ἄφανής (hidden harmony), life and death in the lyre and bow, the intertwining of life and death proper in the double meaning of the bow’.²⁹ In fragment 48 it is asserted that ‘The bow (βιός) is called life (βίος), but its work is death’.³⁰ The tension of the bow is doubly intense, since it is both part of its structure and its action: it kills the living even as it preserves life. The result of the shot is a specific tension, a ‘back-turning connection’,³¹ between life and death. It interweaves, now conceptually, βίος and βιός.

The shift of the accent that turns βίος into βιός (and vice versa), by virtue of not occurring sequentially but simultaneously in the act of the shot, creates a kind of taut system oscillating between the two positions. This second chiasm is the βίός, with two accents at once. βίός: a tension that cannot sustain life without also taking it; as if doomed to infinite disharmony and therefore, through its disintegration, harmonious. It is a different (neoplastic)³² tension, even more fleshly than the distinction between life and politics. The name of life, to which bios and all its prefixes is a mere pseudonym. This βίός is so fleshly that they (I cannot neutralise this monster through unity of any kind) seem difficult for the immunity of biopolitics to assimilate. This dark, virtual chiasm is alien to it; it must be repudiated by the full richness of its metaphors.

Metastases

Now I would like to turn the edge (ὄγκος) of my scalpel onto the flesh of βίός, towards another edge that has always-already pierced βίος in the form of the arrowheads (ὄγκος) of the βιός-arrows that put it to death. In other words, my microsurgical operation aims to excise the wedge — ◌́ — embedded in βίός, the very principle of its perverse harmony.

In its common sense, ὄγκος (which gives us ‘oncology’) means something expanding, disseminating, growing: tumefying. It is precisely this sense that Kant invokes when he speaks of passions in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View:

Passions are cancerous stores for pure practical reason, and most of them are incurable because the sick person does not want to be cured and avoids the dominion of the principle by which alone a cure could be effected. In the area of what is sensuously practical, reason proceeds from the general to the particular, according to the axiom not to please only a single inclination by placing all the rest in the shade or in a dark corner, but rather to see to it that it shares properly with the totality of all inclinations.³¹

Here, passion appears as an inclination swollen in relation to others, violating the idea of transcendental harmony (or should we now say, transcendental homeostasis?).³⁴ This sense of ὄγκος as swelling, as a deviation from harmony, is what Baudrillard evokes when he writes about cancer as:

…a proliferation ad infinitum of a base cell without taking into consideration the organic laws of the whole… nothing opposes itself any longer to the renewal of the Same, to the unchecked proliferation of a single matrix.³⁵

Even Bataille, who at first glance serves as a prominent counteragent here, speaks of cancer in terms of logic of growth.³⁶ Such an interpretation of ὄγκος (as expanding, proliferating) equates the benign and the malignant. After all, tissue expansion does not mean that returning to a state of homeostasis is impossible. This is why Kant writes rather of a benign tumour: passion can at any moment be cut away in the name of restoring transcendental harmony. Yet when Baudrillard and Bataille write about it, we are instead dealing with a malignant tumour: an irreversible, metastatic swelling. Yet this passage from homeostasis to metastasis, from an expansion still contained within the organism’s unity to an unstoppable rupture, an irreversible and deadly malignant growth, appears here, just as in the models of oncogenesis we encountered at the very beginning, rather as a fact: not interpreted, but interpreting everything.

So how do we distinguish the benign from the malignant? This difference is plastic, chiasmatically concealed within the flesh of ὄγκος. The second meaning of ὄγκος³⁷ is arrowhead, point, sting. A point meant to pierce the living and bring it death. This is what transforms the tension between life and death, between health and disease, between a benign and a malignant tumour, into a crossing that no longer shifts, embedded in the word ὄγκος itself, between the two senses of the word.³⁸ It indicates the virtual deadliness of any swelling; a swelling that may reveal a clear political aim directed against the body’s interests. It runs against the interests of bios, that is, life that is politicised (and politicising), propped up by the architecture of protocols, in other words, against nearly all life present here. And the logic that renders the expanding, swelling (the first sense of ὄγκος) sharp, wounding and killing (the second sense) is not something external. It is ὄγκος itself. The transition between the benign and the malignant is not a transition proper, it cannot be drawn into any dialectic whatsoever. In ὄγκος there is no shift toward death like the shift of accentuation we can trace in βίος. It is this very shift, this very wedge. One can never know with certainty that there is no cancer within oneself, because its emergence cannot be calculated, its origin cannot be detected. For doctors, a tumour is malignant always already post factum, when homeostasis in the sick body has become metastasis. But this means only one thing: it was malignant all along, always governed by ὄγκος. ὄγκος itself is malignant difference — ◌́ —, that is, indifference. βίος is always the result of ὄγκος, and the passage from βίος to βιός is again effected by ὄγκος. ὄγκος is the very chiasm (ϰ) in the biopolitical system. This is a malignant chiasm: all this time, we have been using the Greek letter kappa (κ), which in some fonts looks like ϰ, creating a carcinogenic resemblance to chi (χ). A chiasm sutured twice: first, in Heraclitus’s thought into a mere notch — ◌́ —  and, in contemporary discussions on biopolitics, into a dot (bios): ◌̇ .

Death

Escape³⁹ is the final stage of immunoediting perpetrated by the cells of a tumour poised between benignity and malignancy. Immunity protocols no longer have a destructive effect on the tumour. What’s more, these very protocols become part of the tumour’s apparatus as instruments of growth and metastasis. At this stage, the tumour becomes alien, an enemy, turning the organism’s βίος into irreversible βιός.

What stands before us is a machine of death built on immortality, on the incredible resilience of all cancer cells to death. A curious paradox: for the organism to live, it must inclusively exclude death, include it as apoptosis, programmed, protocolised dying. Heidegger’s machine of being-towards-death in its most biopolitical manifestation, the key autoimmune⁴⁰ protocol of our body, ensuring its survival. But what about the force that escapes it? That which reshapes the relation between life and death, perhaps forever? If cancer is not simply a pole of life that we must include as yet another queer-form of bios,⁴¹ like a woman rubbing testosterone into her skin,⁴² but rather a logic forever wedged into all life, never ceasing to live (die) within the living? If so, then life itself is queer. Cancer, which strangely does not reveal its malignancy, does not bare the sting of its ὄγκος. ἀρχή^-1

We need a different oncology, an oncology that probes into this second meaning of ὄγκος. An oncology that renders ontology oncological, revealing in what is the what to eat.⁴⁴ Ontology is oncology, or more precisely, onkology. Onkology in this sense is just some strange neoplasm, a strange ontᵏology incapable of becoming a new philosophical lens or discipline, yet also preventing ontology itself from becoming a sealed philosophical body. Who knows, maybe this was philosophy’s initial intention: if ‘the origin of all wars is the pursuit of wealth, and we are forced to pursue wealth because we live in slavery to the cares of the body’ so ‘we have no leisure for philosophy’, then ‘the true philosopher studies to die’.⁴⁵ To be philosopher is to escape the unified body of the State, to become immortal. So it was not the ideal eternity of ontological whatness Socrates was pointing out. It was oncological is-ness as not being of being but as the cancerous eating being. Something that Heidegger would see in his nightmares.

There is only an eternally self-consuming conspiracy within existence, hidden in the English is, showing through in the Latin est and esse, demonstrating how little difference there is between what is and what to eat (so clumsily rendered in the phrase you are what you eat).⁴⁶ Onkology exposes ὄγκος as a principle, simultaneously a non-fundamental, malignant difference, an indifference of all life, but also a politics, a special politics of metastasis that works where no biopolitics has even been considered yet. This is because the scale at which this politics operates is always smaller than the scale at which protocols act. Qu^estid: whatness (quidditas) is being devoured by is-ness (est-itas) from within:⁴⁷ it operates where there is not yet any, not even an evental, binding that could form a sequence. Protocols get eaten. All that remains is something in between the very binding. The malignant indifference of the tumour: a devouring binding that has bound nothing and binds with nothing.