“Condensed in a formula, the Technological Civilization can be characterized as the transition from ratio to generativity, from matter to process, from nature to the hybrid.” –Davor Löffler
If we follow the self-avowed German Accelerationism and deep futurology of Davor Löffler (Löffler 2021), we can posit that everything is co-evolutionary and that there are no historical coincidences. For example, Wolfgang Ernst shows how the advent of photographic emulsion coincided with the fervent embrace of positivism, and how this new (cold) media produced a purported access to the world-in-itself, i.e. outside the phenomenological tropes of the human observer (Ernst 2013). Pursuing this line of thought, perhaps there are no real coincidences, and in the spirit of the opening Löffler quote we can zoom into this transitional convergence by way of a most specific contemporary example: namely, the coevolutionary nature between the new matrix of becoming – generativity – and the use of retinol, where both superimpose onto each other.
It’s safe to say that in our world of generativity, it is proactive behavior that has gained in importance, and everything, from theories to materials and/or interfaces, exhibits this kind of behavior. The days of a static world (or nature) as a background are long gone, and even inanimate materials have become much more than simple tools at our disposal. Thought via the concept of proactivity, the technical world has reoriented our understanding of the optimal (and efficient) use of resources, as exhibited also in the functioning of new interfaces. If we stick with a first very telling example that will lay the groundwork for retinol, we must mention sport or, more specifically, the fitness landscape. There, the days of bodybuilding are on the wane and only specialists are still keen on reading the working manuals of Arnold Schwarzenegger instead of trying functional approaches to movement, muscle gain and a holistic understanding of health in general. If the first theory understands the body as a highly demanding energy system that gains muscle growth through intensive stress put on the body (heavy weightlifting, long work hours, high protein diet), the latter abandons this perspective and thinks that the only thing the body really needs is help, not manual exercise of force from the outside. The body already has all the tools at hand, and the best way to gain strength and advance is through the optimization of self-regulating functions that traverse our biological system. In fact, the whole goal of the new “fitness” philosophy is to start from a wholly different entry-point by thinking about the body through a process of self-organization and automation. Thus, what we try to do with exercises now is not damaging muscle tissue but setting the conditions for a body to learn a new function, type of behavior, etc. so that it will be able to reproduce it without conscious knowledge and close the loop.
This is relevant because it touches on the emerging concept of agency in our current system and indicates the slow transition from more static conceptions of the world to more generatively hybrid ones. The universe is, to put it crudely, becoming more and more alive, and this is something that is increasingly discussed in the scientific community.[1] In the above briefly sketched example, it’s far more efficient to let the body self-sustain and grow itself, enable the process of automatization, rather than try to exercise force or stir a body in a certain direction that doesn’t really hold. We’re increasingly learning that the properties of a system are always in charge, and the agent can and should only stimulate the latent potency of the generative aspects of matter to lead to the processes of self-organization and concretization. Returning to Löffler, each civilizational stage has the capacity to domesticate (and generate) new kinds of events, and it’s this ability to trigger a process that signals a shift in our current abilities compared to past stages (Löffler 2018). It is this soft approach that interests us in this essay, and it was Michel Serres that offered a conceptual staging for understanding this transition in our capacity of world-making – a move from energy to information.
There are two ways of dealing with a road that is in bad condition. One is to hire a team of laborers to fill in the potholes, apply a new surface of bitumen and steamroller it flat. The other is to put up a sign saying ‘Roadworks in Progress’. In the first case, the traffic is able to renew its work of eroding the newly-restored road; in the second, drivers can be persuaded to drive more slowly and thus to conserve what remains of it. The first method involves laborious manipulation of matter; the second is an altogether more feathery (and cheaper) affair of signs. (Connor 2009)
Serres represents language and information as an ongoing process of softening the hardness of given things, and it’s this approach that must be accelerated in order to reach the full potential of the co-evolutionary coupling of logos with matter (Ernst 2021).
Now, let’s come back to retinol by first looking at its history. In fact, retinol has been with us for the better part of the last century[2] but the expansion of potential use-cases has been quite slow, due to the toxicity of retinol acid known as hypervitaminosis A.[3] Thus, its potential for implementation was from the start limited to only a part of the pharmaceutical profession, where it was first used in a clinical setting to treat acne, inflammatory scalp, skin pigmentation, etc., and didn’t yet penetrate into the mainstream or public domain (or consciousness). Only after the advancement in our ability to synthesize this molecule in different ways – after all, retinols can be divided into three generations (see Malwina Zasada and Budzisz 2019) – has there been an interest in its further development into commercial products. It was then that the beauty industry pushed things further and made an important leap in retinol use, as the search for the (new) anti-aging “ingredient” would finally become a real possibility. Staying with this concept, the anti-aging metaphor describes the same kind of generative procedure, this time advanced by an important presupposition, i.e. the possibility to reverse-engineer the process(es) in our body, which can set back the clock by inserting novel instructions for how the (cell) receptors should behave after a certain period of their lifetime. Anti-aging is thus a highly advanced concept (or idea), as it again steers things in the same kind of informational direction, and we could say that its functioning is not of a manual but digital nature. Differently put, it’s not so much that retinol is a new kind of property or a new kind of ingredient. Rather, it’s more like code (or an instruction) that must first successfully insert itself into the body, and it’s only through this kind of algorithmic compression of data that we have any chance at succeeding in such an endeavor, namely of having the chance to communicate to the body the necessary instructions for the start of the anti-aging process.
How then does retinol work? As has been said, retinol is a derivative of vitamin A, a vitamin that has been very effective for treating various skin diseases, pigmentation, skin deterioration, etc. Looking from the outside-in, the most basic description of the functioning of retinol is that it strengthens and thickens the dermis of our skin and therefore not only keeps the skin moist and elastic but pushes away the wrinkle-effect that otherwise only progresses.[4] With retinol use, there are actual clinical studies that firmly confirm this phenomenon, and the thickening of the dermis is proven by data and clinical experiments (Kong et al. 2015). But how exactly is this derivative of vitamin A so effective? Retinol is like a diver, since the molecule must first successfully penetrate the upper layer of the skin, and then successfully merge with the (cell) receptors. In fact, what retinol does is it renews the communication between receptor networks and “convinces” them to postpone the process of aging. Whereas in normal circumstances the cells would cease producing the factors the skin needs for regeneration, it is the molecule that inserts itself in the chain of command and debugs the malfunctioning algorithm with new strand(s) of code. Retinol is thus not a property per se, but more like a command that enters the body and tells the organism to behave in a certain way. Its only goal is (re)learning, and in that sense it has the ability to reverse-engineer the process of aging and is thus (to a certain extent legitimately) branded as an anti-aging product.
An excellent summary of clinical data, experiments, and descriptions of the functioning of retinol is given on Paula’s Choice website:
For all parts of our bodies to work properly, including skin cells, each cell must know how to perform the correct action at the correct time – and, hopefully, to ignore the information (in the form of messenger substances) that tells cells to do the wrong thing. This takes place through constant communication, with many substances telling cells how and when to function properly, and the cells then relaying that information to each other. (Paula’s Choice 2022)
In the case of retinol, this means “telling the cell to start doing the things a healthy skin cell should be doing. If the cell accepts the message, the cell can then share the same healthy message with other nearby cells and so on and so on” (ibid.). Returning to the example of matter versus information, here different interfaces are trying to come up with ways of solving a computational problem of translation between matter and logos. It’s fascinating to see a contemporary example of such a soft interface in the cosmetic industry, as everything around us is becoming computational and smart. The focus on interfaces thus also becomes a focus on the “unnaturalness” of everything, including our bodies: we haven’t yet learned the full importance of this ability for intervention that is emerging across all of society, the world, or worlds in general. Nevertheless, it is of the utmost importance to understand how and why new informational interfaces are becoming more and more actively transformative, that they are part of the new matrix of becoming that describes our shift in civilizational capacity (Köster 2022) and that are the reason for generative horizons to (finally) become a reality.
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Notes
[1] “The idea that the universe is expanding its capacity for creation is an idea considered by Peirce, but is also being reconsidered today in the quest to find the origin of Life. In this quest some are starting to believe that the early universe had a lower creation capability than today’s universe.” (Patarroyo 2022: 2467)
[2] Just 50 years ago, in 1931, the isolation and structure detemfination of retinol, from halibut liver oil, was achieved by Karrer and his associates (see Nutley 1982: 577).
[3] Ibid., 580: “In man, these side effects appear as changes in the skin and mucous membranes, and in the form of muscle and joint pains and headaches. Thus, in the search begun in 1968 for new retinoids with better activity and lower toxicity.”
[4] See Zasada and Buszisz, 2019: “Retinol stimulates the cellular activity of keratinocytes, fibroblasts, melanocytes and Langerhans cells. Retinol, by interacting with receptors inside keratinocytes, promotes their proliferation, strengthens the epidermal protective function, reduces transepidermal water loss, protects collagen against degradation and inhibits the activity of metalloproteinases which are responsible for degradation of the extracellular matrix. Moreover, it enhances remodelling of reticular fibres and stimulates angiogenesis in the papillary layer of the dermis.”
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