Botting - Monsters and Metaphor

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Journal for Cultural Research

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Metaphors and monsters

Fred Botting Available online: 24 Jun 2010
To cite this article: Fred Botting (2003): Metaphors and monsters, Journal for Cultural Research, 7:4, 339-365 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1479758032000165020
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Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2003, 339365
Metaphors and Monsters

Fred Botting
Abstract Neither poetry nor creativity, neither technology nor experimentation, are what or where they used to be. Metaphor and monstrosity, as manifested by the power and pervasiveness of code in information theory, biotechnological practice and cultural representation, are tellingly transformed in the shift from modernity to hypermodernity. Frankenstein, an inaugural and persistent myth of modern monstrosity, continues to inform and disturb popular fascinations and scientific research: its currency, its monstrous metaphorical resonance, when associated with genetics and technology, raise far-reaching questions concerning the imbrication of human norms, esthetic productions, scientific power and any vision of a future.
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Making myth Only by a long stretch of the imagination can Frankenstein be called a geneticist. But it is precisely the imagination that, in Mary Shelleys fiction, is stretched as tightly as the sallow skin across the monsters face. Frankensteins pursuit of the principle of life is driven by ardent imagining. His work is repeatedly dressed up in the language of Romanticism, in terms of wonder, vision and enthusiasm. The discovery of the secret of life, a secret the cautionary element of his tale refuses to disclose, is also described as the discovery of the cause of generation and life (Shelley 1969:39). Even before it identifies and masters this cause, the imagination, in excess of reality, benevolently and humanistically projects a realm of life beyond death, disease and suffering and, in more personal terms, elevates the scientist to a divine status as a father of an eternally grateful new species (Shelley 1969:54). An alchemical transmutation of new life from an assemblage of dead body parts suggests a fantastical dimension underlying the practical scientific labor of successful creation. Imagination and science, romance and reality, art and experimentation, are not simply opposed in the novel. The division of faculties between arts and sciences has yet to occur. Poets, like Shelleys husband, Percy, dabbled in experimentation and scientific theory. The imbrication of what are later divided into two cultures, however, is enabled by a distinction between models of science. In the novel, the young student encounters two professors, each with different notions of science and scientific method (Cosslett 1982). The first, Krempe, a professor of natural philosophy, is horrified to learn of the time Frankenstein has wasted on the works of the alchemists. He is quick to criticize their exploded systems and institute a new regime of study. Frankensteins grand visions are cut down to size, exchanged for realities of little worth (Shelley 1969:46). His professor of chemistry,
ISSN 1479-7585 Print/ISSN 1740-1666 online/03/040339-27 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1479758032000165020
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Waldman, has a markedly different approach. Not only does he speak in terms of classification, facts and experimentation, he distinguishes the man of science from the petty experimentalist in grander expostulations: dabbling in dirt, with eyes poring over microscope and crucible, the scientist nonetheless performs miracles, penetrates the recesses of nature, ascends to the heavens in discoveries of the circulation of blood and the components of air. There is, for sure, a hint of alchemy in the rhetoric of harnessing new and almost unlimited powers, or capturing the ability to command the thunder of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows (Shelley 1969:47). Waldmans rhetoric, like his scientific field, echoes that of Humphrey Davy who, in his lectures on chemistry, expatiated on the promise and potential of scientific discovery (Crouch 1971). The language, moreover, resonates with Romantic esthetics to fill a world of objects, effects and causes with sublime emotions and visions of wonder. Frankenstein is as much Romantic poet as experimental scientist: as the poet animates dead letters with a creative spirit, so the scientist infuses dead matter with the spark of life. If one were to follow the association of poet and scientist in the long and entangled reception history of Frankenstein, it is the former who ought to receive more blame for the tragic consequences of creation: though scientific techniques allow the creature to be made in a practical sense, art is responsible for making the monster, for the act of rejection that creates a lonely, wretched and vengeful outcast. The only grounds for rejection given by the novel are esthetic: the creator is repulsed by the physical appearance of his creation. No matter how wonderful such an act of creation may be as a technical achievement, it fails to match up to the exorbitant fantasies that gave shape to the work in the first place. In its causes and effects, then, imagination finds itself inextricably bound up with, even as it remains in excess of, reality. Only after the novel was written do now familiar judgements about the relationship between art and science manifest themselves (Botting 1991). Some reviewers of the time find a strong element of immorality in the underlying idea of the novel. Popular melodramatic adaptations of the 1820s bring out the theme of presumption (Forry 1990). It is a theme subsequently acknowledged in the authors introduction to the 1831 edition, where the scientist is said to be mocking the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world (Shelley 1969:9). Receptions and recreations of the novel continue the process, distilling the relationship of art and science into a clear-cut duality. The novel is transformed into the first cautionary tale of scientific research, laying out the dangers of meddling, like the sorcerers apprentice, in matters beyond human understanding and control. It becomes synomymous with an irresponsible tampering with the natural order, unleashing powerfully destructive forces. The threat of monstrous consequences thus establishes a limit between the selfish ambitions of human endeavor and the balance of a natural order, marking a line that, if crossed, leads to disaster. Another hierarchy also appears in the division between art and science: the former supplies the moral vision lacking in the latter, attempting to return technological innovation to an older framework based on the bounded opposition of humanity and nature, a relationship that technology was already dangerously supplementing. If cultural commentators and critics remain concerned by the morality of art, insisting on the superiority of an esthetically ordered moral code, the popular appeal of the novel and its variants, in which Frankenstein and monster enter modern mythology, is as much to do with
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sensation, excitement and emotion as moral or rational understanding. Monsters give form to fears, desires and anxieties, allowing the channelling and expulsion of emotional energies. In its infectious myth-making, art, it seems, does not simply conjure up and circulate a series of colourful representations of science that develop independently and according to their own generic and cultural momentum: science is implicated in and affected by the process since it never remains outside the cultural sphere. As scientist, Frankenstein has, despite minimal scientific reference in the novel itself, become associated with the apparatuses, tubes, vials and wires of laboratory labor. From early political caricatures that represent reform as unwarranted scientific experimentation with the social body (Baldick 1987; Forry 1990) to early Hollywoods gigantic scientific-Gothic sets, the tools of the trade form a crucial appendage to the vision of monstrous creation (OFlinn 1995). Frankenstein enters the language, somewhat ambiguously applying to both creator and creation, to name any product of experimentation that causes concern in crossing the borders of humanity and nature. Even Thomas Edisons talking doll, manufactured in the later 1800s, a toy modelled on the work of automata makers a century before, is seen as a scientific Frankenstein monster (Wood 2002:122). A century later nuclear technologies are seen through the screen of Shelleys novel, with anxieties about the power of atomic science understood as fathering the unthinkable; that is, in unnaturally usurping female reproductive power gives birth to a destructive energy capable of effacing humanity and nature at a single stroke (Easlea 1983). Aware of concerns about what genetics is doing to the future, Steve Jones (1993) asks the common question: Are we in danger of producing a race of Frankensteins? before asserting the fact that the new biology has brought little but benefit and thoughtfully retrospeculating that genetics may have helped Mary Shelley in her suffering from child loss and depression (Jones 1993:2234) Though noting that the novel has been generalised to apply to almost any technology, Jon Turney focuses on the special affinity it holds with technologies of life (1998:160). In tracing this affinity, he draws out the many representations of different branches of the life sciences that invoke Frankenstein, from reports on experimental physiology in the 1920s (Turney 1998:83) to the work of contemporary molecular biology which itself promoted the idea that it had uncovered the secrets of life (Turney 1998:135) and, of course, to accounts of human cloning in which Frankenstein emerges like a genetic engineer (Turney 1998:220). As a myth of modernity, Frankenstein vents its deepest fears and desires concerning the violability of the human body (Turney 1998:8). But when the secret of life is found in genetic form what is most intimate to being is simultaneously rendered general and external: with molecular genetics, the essence of what lies within is not to be thought at the level of organs, or even cells. It is information (Turney 1998:219). In opening the body up to scrutiny and technological intervention, its boundaries are no longer delimited by the skin, but spread across the new social and economic formation as the code connecting networks across the globe. Frankensteins reference spreads at the same time: the phrase Frankenstein revolution is applied to the new directions of genetic research (Ryder 1990:192); Frankenstein foods becomes the popular name for genetically manipulated agricultural products. Even life that has no organic component whatsoever enjoys the same association: Von Neumann was
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aware of the stigma assigned to those who tried to produce lifelike processes by artificial means. The ghost of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein monster, or any other number of more recent science fictions, casts a mottled shadow over such enterprises (Levy 1992:17). Artifical life, drawn from the work of cyberneticists, in which code is electronic and binary rather than genetic, finds itself included in a telling embrace: information has become the new terrain of living, of creation and of technological innovation and, of course, the locus of a new species of monsters. It is thus no surprise that Frankenstein, which inaugurates modernitys popular fascination with artificially created life, retains its currency. Mary Shelleys protagonist or, rather, protagonists, if one is to include the monster (or protagonist if one is to imply that both, like the misapplication of the name Frankenstein itself, form a single but curiously doubled being) has, it seems, made two lasting cultural impressions: the first, in molding a popular and persistent idea of the experimental scientist, has shrouded science in suspicion and clouded objectivity and experimentation with baser motives like desire, ambition and selfish short-sighted immorality; the second sees the novel, almost against itself, and certainly in contrast to the refusal of its eponymous protagonist to make a female of the species, spawn, throughout modern culture, new races of monsters and scientists (and often indistinguishable combinations of both), batch after batch of proliferating, mutating monster-scientists, hybrids whose artifical, textual, cinematic evolution has seemingly run out of all control, in fictions and as well as science. Indeed, the division which sees art attempt to elevate itself by providing the moral vision and humane authority ignored by science, does not leave the latter unaffected, to continue its experiments according to proper rational and objective principles. The fictions which engender fear, desire, excitement and terror do not allow science to remain isolated from the culture in which it operates and which its innovations are supposed to serve. Instead, they shape popular perceptions of scientific practice and Frankenstein foods provides a strong example inform reactions to the products of research and development. So much so that Mary Shelley, nearly 200 years on, has been blamed for the current negative attitude to science and scientists. Lewis Wolpert has repeatedly commented on the misperceptions engendered by Shelleys novel, noting how it serves as shorthand for the dangers of science and observing that it was Shelley herself who created the monster, not science (Wolpert and Richards 1988). Wolpert wants to reestablish the division that separates art from science, wishing the former kept its misperceptions to itself, thus allowing the latter to get on with its own business. But the imaginary, literary and metaphorical association, it seems, has too strong a hold on the imagination: the very term genetic engineering conjures up the image of Frankenstein and his monster, writes Wolpert, going on to describe Shelley as the unintentional evil fairy godmother of genetics. Literary imaginings, in literary form, continue to haunt science, its demons, it seems, too intensely embedded in culture to expel. The very fact of contemporary science arguing over Romantic texts testifies to a continued irritation that is put down to the effects of fiction. Fiction, with its effects on the popular imagination, bothers science, an affront, perhaps, to its rationality and discipline. More than offering idle decorations of cultural life, fiction has effects, distorting the truth and reality of the scientific world. In upsetting rationality and objectivity, in provoking emotional responses to, and
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from, science, fiction induces a disturbance within the scientific project that it must attempt to cast out.1 In asking the question, Are movies impeding the progress of biotechnology?, Stephen Nottingham (1999) makes a similar double gesture that recognizes the effects of fiction on science while trying to expunge them. His argument notes the manner in which myth frames cultural experience and metaphor shapes perceptions. His case, however, not only complains against the extensive popular cultural misrepresentations of science, it attempts to counter negative images by making a cultural, rather than scientific, claim: he invokes esthetic categories to promote science: scientific knowledge can be intrinsically beautiful and on the side of the poets. Richard Dawkins (1996) claims about the capacity of science to evoke awe are cited in support of this esthetic power. Elsewhere, Dawkins has called upon and complained against poets and poetic power. He criticizes the Romantic position in respect of scientific rationality. For Keats and Blake, science succeeds only in clipping an Angels wings and conquering sacred mysteries. But Dawkins is eager to play poetry against the poets in a fantastic encounter:
I wish I could meet Keats or Blake to persuade them that mysteries dont lose their poetry because they are solved. Quite the contrary. The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle, and anyway the solution uncovers deeper mystery.
The appeal to mystery and beauty finds another eminent advocate from science, no less a figure than Einstein: the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science (cit. Dawkins 1996). Science does not dabble profanely among monstrosities, but sings with the poets. On a higher level, a plane of beauty and mystery, poets and scientists are united. Divisions between art and science, perpetuated for over a century, are reconciled, monstrous misperceptions corrected by the shared quest, one that is both esthetic and scientific. This position, however, draws as much on a Romantic Frankenstein as that isolating its monster-making: the novel was as concerned with esthetics as it was with science, and though popular myth-making has highlighted the figure of the monster in adaptations and revisions of the story, the issues of poetry, beauty and mystery remain integral to the questions it poses. There would be no monster without Frankenstein whose aims are shaped as much by Romantic esthetics and humanistic values as they are by scientific ideas from Davy, Volta and Darwin. In the figure of his mentor, Waldman, a fictional rendering of Davy, the position of a beautiful and mysterious science, as advanced by Dawkins, is already made plain. Dawkins claims, then, partake of the same tradition as that which represents scientific monstrosity. Science, it seems, does not only inherit the monstrous component of Frankensteins representations, the uncontrollable figure that exceeds its creator, it also adopts the esthetic system, the creative aspiration, that informs the project in the first place. Doubles of the other, the poetic and the monstrous are born together. Monsters emerge in the traversal of esthetic and scientific enquiry, the doubled antithesis of systems of beauty and mystery. Both systems, rather than one or other, are infused with the capacity to produce monstrosity. Confounding art and science, esthetic artifice and nature, poetic and technological creativity, Frankenstein articulates and upsets the oppositions that define modernity, its monstrosity
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as myth and text refusing the straightforwardly modern divisions and dualisms. The text does not merely represent monstrosity, it offers a sustained reflection on productions, including its own, of monstrosity. As a text, it is monstrous, suturing different narratives together and reflecting upon their interrelations. As a cultural myth, it continues to perform monstrously, not only in the generation of so many new monsters, but in the way that these monsters, like the being created by Frankenstein, interrogate the world they inhabit and the systems that make them monsters. Making monsters
Monsters have a long biological and textual history. In modernity, however, they are born with the classificatory sciences, integral to the taxonomies that identify and order species rather than mere curiosities to be looked upon in idle wonder. Discussing the emergence of modernity, a new discursive formation in which biology develops from natural history, Michel Foucault plots the different functions of monsters, noting their necessity as beings enabling the identification of visible species, allowing the latter to be separated out from the ceaseless background of monstrosities that appear, glimmer, sink into the abyss, and occasionally survive (Foucault 1970:154). Monsters, it seems, are not deviations from nature, but form the condition for the emergence of species, as natural as anything else in a system in which proper species and deviations are initially inseparable. According to J-B Robinet they take the form of metamorphoses of the prototype just as natural as the others (cited in Foucault 1970). They are simply the effects of a natural process at work, a means of passing preparing the transition from one form to another: it is only, perhaps, by dint of producing monstrous beings that nature succeeds in producing beings of greater regularity and with more symmetrical structure (cited in Foucault 1970:155). In this respect, Foucault notes, monsters disclose their necessity, forming the background noise, as it were, the endless murmur of nature (155). Monsters, for the systems that identify them, however, serve other functions, ensuring in time, and for our theoretical knowledge, a continuity (156). There are two natures disclosed by monsters: that which is ordered, classified and regulated by scientific discourse, and that which remains undifferentiated, in process. Monsters form the point of articulation between the two, located as part of the undifferentiated murmur or noise of natural process and marked out in the identification of proper and recognizable species: on the basis of the continuum held by nature, the monster ensures the emergence of difference (cited in Foucault 1970:156). Monsters, then, are split in two: no more, nor less, than effects of natural process, no different from other beings, as Robinet suggested. But, in respect of the systems of differentiation to which they give rise, they become, retrospectively, monsters, beings out of place in a nature ordered and classified according to scientific principles that cannot countenance them other than as monsters. For Foucault, they are merely the backward projection of those differences and identities that provide taxonomia first with structure, then with character (Foucault 1970:157). Hence monsters survive as an invented category, as the excess of categorization, the non-categorizable category in which monstrous beings are placed in order to ensure the stability and continuity of scientific systems of differentiation. Internal but excluded, the condition that
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precedes differentiation and yet allows the production of difference and identity, the double status of monsters remains both necessity and threat. If monsters are retrospectively identified as beings out of nature, even though their existence is no more than evidence of undifferentiated natural process, the only nature from which they are excluded is that classified by science: to alter the perspective slightly, in the manner that the ambivalence of monsters often demands, it is science and its nature that appears as monstrous excresence. The ambivalence of the monster is always, given its retrospective function, something of a metaphor providing form for what is formless. It inhabits texts as much as nature. A strange biotextual entity, it marks a crossing where the real and the world of symbols confound each other. As Jacques Derrida notes, a monster takes the form of a composite figure of heterogeneous organisms that are grafted on to each other. Such hybridization, he continues, also applies to certain kinds of writing, texts composed of diverse and heterogeneous elements. Monsters, however, are also imbricated in the demarcation of limits and norms: faced with a monster, one may become aware of what the norm is and when this norm has a history, thus allowing an analysis of the history of norms (Derrida 1992:3856). Monsters thus glimmer on boundaries of normalcy, fantasmatic projections of fear and desire, excess and prohibition. But the monster is not solely a chimerical figure, it is always alive. It possesses a singular and unrecognized appearance, a species for which we do not yet have a name. Though without name, it does not mean that the species is abnormal, namely, the composition or hybridization of already known species. In showing itself, it shows itself in something that is not yet shown and that therefore looks like a hallucination, it strikes the eye, it frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared one to identify this figure (Derrida 1992:386). Appearing in a form that cannot be recognized, that is, an appearance whose formlessness demands the projection of a form that metaphor provides, monsters remain visible and yet unseen, alien to habits of perception, on the fringes of comprehension. Inadequate though it must be, the metaphor of monster registers an encounter with something unrecognized, marking the glimpse of a shadowy figure from which eyes are averted, the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of a nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity (Derrida 1998:293). Liminal, speechless, formless, the apprehension of the monstrosity lurking at the limit of sense does not remain an unformed figure of a difference that cannot be assimilated, of some Thing altogether other. Rather, it is apprehended by metaphor, the appellation of monster rendering it familiar, recognizable, defined and excluded in the form of monster:
But as soon as one perceives a monster in a monster, one begins to domesticate it, one begins, because of the as such it is a monster as monster to compare it to the norms, to analyze it, consequently to master whatever could be terrifying in this figure of the monster. And the movement of accustoming oneself, but also of legitimation and, consequently, of normalization, has already begun. (Derrida 1992:386)
Monsters do not remain monstrous, the metaphor sees to that, projecting something more familiar in the space of monstrosity in order to screen out the
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formlessness which is too horrific to countenance, too threatening for the powers-that-be. The metaphor of monster gives the unnameable some kind of name, like Frankenstein (wretch, outcast), but not a proper name that stamps being with place, paternity and a genealogy. The monster is not included in the norms that it brings to light. It remains outside normal classification, while still being classified as the limit of the norm. Indeed, the domestication of the monster as monster keeps it in its place insofar as that place remains different from the norm. Hence monsters are brought under the sway of law, not in order that they become subjects of its protection or inclusion: marked as monsters, they can be legitimately, even violently, policed and excluded.
Making metaphor A being formed of the fragments of books as much as bodies, Frankensteins creation is bound up with writing, representation, with the textual in-forming of reality and conferral of identity, monstrous or otherwise. A screen for the projection of fantasies, fears, anxieties, a being whose first encounter with its selfimage is from the reactions of others and the journals of his creator, the monster goes forth and prospers, as Shelley bids it, as text, as figure, as metaphor. Monsters, indeed, are formlessness figured, figures disfigured, misshapen shapes that lurk on the outer reaches of systems of classification and representation, shadowy forms for what is yet unformed, without name and place. That monsters, in modernity at least, are made implies an active process by which threatening entities are named as nameless, thereby excluded, rendered other, monstered by systems of perception, understanding, or representation. In this process, metaphor comes to the fore as both the conferring of names in place of that which can have no name; that is, substituting the name of monster in place of the disturbing absence of nomenclature, or in bestowing another name, that of a father, say, which situates being in the proper social and symbolic circuit. As, always already, metaphor, the term monster discloses, demonstrates even, the monstrosity of metaphor itself: metaphor, a constitutent of poetic language, makes beauty, enhances expression in its substitutions and comparisons. But it also makes monsters, gives repellent form to unformed entities. Metaphors shape reality, framing the world that is inhabited. At the same time, they distort what is real, substituting figures in place of objects and things (that language, of course, distinguishes), thereby demonstrating the entanglement of linguistic figures in the ordering of the world as it is lived and perceived. As metaphor, monsters reflect back on metaphors necessity in the very constitution of human reality. Metaphor and hence its monstrosity as well as creativity is not just restricted to the realm of poetry and rhetoric, it is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action, crucial in structuring how we perceive, how we think, and what we do (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:34). And metaphors, both new and old, can have the power to define reality (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:157). For Paul Ricoeur, metaphor exploits the creativity of language (Ricoeur 1991:70). Its creativity, moreover, stems from both polysemy and a deviation from conventional usage of words. Here metaphor does not merely actualize a potential connotation, it creates it (Ricoeur 1991:79). In this respect it exceeds a simply rhetorical or decorative mode associated with poetic language and challenges the idea that it designates a straightforward substitution of one term for another. It
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supplements ordinary language which often fails to live up to the challenge of understanding (Ricoeur 1991:73). In supplementing, of course, it supplants mimetic functions of representing reality or reflecting thought. Metaphor invents; it innovates. In doing so, it redescribes reality, breaking through prior categories of language and thought and establishing new logical boundaries on the ruins of preceding ones (Ricoeur 1991:81). Ricoeurs argument addresses both poetry and science, not as distinct uses of language, but in the manner that both affect reality. Poetry is not a mode of language that abolishes conventional reality in favor of worlds of the imagination: it opens the possibility of reshaping the real. Like scientific models (which explain something unknown in terms of familiar examples) it functions as a heuristic fiction and as such prepares the way for a redescription of reality that, while offering no empirical information, may change our way of looking at things, a change which is no less real than empirical knowledge. Thus poetry offers a new way of being in the world, of orientating ourselves. Similarly, with metaphor we experience the metamorphosis of both language and reality (Ricoeur 1991:84). Fiction and images, Ricoeur argues, operate in the same manner, not only fleshing out meaning, but manifesting the capacity to invent it: fictio comes from facere and so when the image is made, it is also able to remake the world (Ricoeur 1991:129). If poetry, images and fiction redescribe and create, so, too, does scientific discourse. Ricoeur is critical of attempts to produce a transparent language that clearly presents things as they are or fixes a one-to-one relation of words and objects in the world. This dream of a radical and complete reformulation of the whole of our language, he writes, noting the efforts of scientists and philosophers like Leibniz, Russell and Wittgenstein to identify the rules of a language which would be the exact picture of the structure of facts, is a project that must fail (Ricoeur 1991:75). Science, in its search for clearer and more stable definitions, replaces words with symbols whose abstraction breaks any link there might have been been with natural language (Ricoeur 1991:74). Scientific discourse cannot exempt itself, no matter how much it might like to, from the effects of metaphor and fiction. Ricoeurs analysis sets out to extend the concept of fiction beyond language and the plastic arts, and to acknowledge the work of the analogies, models, and paradigms in the conceptual field of scientific knowledge (Ricoeur 1991:135). As heuristic fictions for redescribing reality, scientific models and analogies work in the fashion of metaphors productive reference, shaping and creating an experience of the world as much as reflecting it (Ricoeur 1991:135). Ricoeur, however, does acknowledge an important difference between between the status of scientific and poetic language, despite the strangely productive metaphorical effects both may have:
Under the shock of fiction, reality becomes problematic. We attempt to elude this painful situation by putting beyond criticism a concept of reality according to which the real is whatever our everyday interests project upon the horizon of the world. This prejudice is not displaced but reinforced by our scientific culture in that for science, reality is what science declares it to be; only scientific discourse denotes reality. (Ricoeur 1991:133)
Reality is a projection, an effect of metaphorical screens. That projection is masked by claims to truth and transparency. But, for Ricoeur, neither truth nor reality guarantee the predominance of scientific discourse, only prejudice does
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that. Science remains a fiction, a way of presenting, perceiving and inhabiting the world as though it is true, but it is a fiction that has the authority to pronounce on the true nature of reality. Monsters, of course, both help establish and also challenge the authoritative fiction of science, too powerful or in any case too threatening for the powersthat-be (Derrida 1992:285). To associate scientists and scientific practice with Frankenstein is thus to refuse their authority and reshape the reality science presents. Perhaps it is not only the metaphor of the monster that disturbs scientists like Wolpert, though it does cast a negative, fictional shadow over the enterprise. Rather, the metaphor of the monster draws with it the monstrosity of metaphor: metaphor arrives from a cultural position outside scientific discourse to misprepresent it, but also works on that discourse from within, operating at the heart of its methods, models and analogies and disclosing that scientific rationality, objectivity and empiricism remain bound up with the creativity of a metaphorical language. The monstrosity of metaphor discloses what sciences entire project refuses to countenance: entangled with metaphors and models, scientific discourse not only describes the world, but redescribes and reshapes it in its own image. Its authority, as a heuristic fiction and not a table of facts, thus remains threatened by the very figures and metaphors on which it is based, subject to their uncontrollable and unscientific recreations and deviations. Monstrous indeed. Scientific discourse cannot dispense with metaphor, it inhabits its dreams of perfection and nightmares of realization. With metaphor, creativity and monstrosity remain impossibly entangled. Divisions and dualities, between reason and imagination, art and reality, so carefully policed in modernity and so horrifyingly confounded at its outset in Frankensteins doubled crossings, are further confounded in the move to post- or hypermodernity, where esthetics is harder to distinguish from reality and nature finds itself almost entirely consumed by technological artifice. Code, as metaphor and model for a revolution in scientific practice, is inscribed in this shift as it defines a different era: technology and biology, furnished with their informational models, are able to do far more than understand nature or reflect reality but assume hitherto unprecedented powers of intervention, transformation and creation. Genetic modification, the enhancement of crop resistance and yields, genetic therapies for effacing diseases, cloning, designer babies, disarm nature as an obstacle to experiments that are both practical and esthetic. The former distinguishes those efforts that may be justified by notions of usefulness: Frankenstein foods may be defended because yields are improved and starving humans are fed. Their counterpart, however, reveals a different aspect: the TK-1 is a zebra fish modified with a jellyfish gene that glows a yellowish green in the dark (Shaikh 2002). An accident of genetic research, it is merely ornamental and to be marketed with other leisure and aquatic pet shop products and novelties, so Willis Fang, the Taikong Corporation President, hopes, as Night Pearls (Dean 2003). But they already have a popular name, the first in a new species: Frankenstein pets. The same research, then, that aims to make specific genes more visible to DNA experiments can make pretty things that glow in the dark. Distinctions between usefulness and uselessness are difficult to maintain. At levels of practicality and esthetics, the aim to enhance innovation and performance is not governed simply by benevolence,
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knowledge or beauty but according to critieria of economic efficiency, market and profit. With the increasing evidence of technosciences extensive poetic or creative powers, fears of uncontrollable mutations are also exacerbated, hence the proliferation of so many technobiological Frankensteins. Paul Virilio outlines his own nightmare vision in which art and biotechnology merge in a new teratological formation. Frankenstein, of course, lurks in the background of this merger, while Monsanto, the Terminator in particular, advances beyond biotechnology: Arent we talking about a form of necro-technology aimed at ensuring one firms monopoly? Thanatophilia, necro-technology, and one day soon, teratology . . . Is this genetic trance still a science, some new alchemy, or is it an extreme art? (Virilio 2003:58). For Virilio, the answer is already evident: extreme art, on the model of extreme sports, is defined by a purely performative drive. What he calls transgenic art marches in the vanguard and aims at nothing less than to embark BIOLOGY on the road to a kind of expressionism whereby teratology will no longer be content just to study malformations, but will resolutely set off in quest of their chimeric reproduction (Virilio 2003:51). An esthetico-scientific enterprise, transgenic art will inhabit museums and magazines, but it will emanate from every pharmacy, every laboratory launching its own lifestyles, its own transhuman fashions (Virilio 2003:61). As esthetics and science collide, art and fear, poetry and monstrosity, are reconfigured, increasingly part of the everyday technoscientific world rather than decorative idealizations or imaginative excesses. With code, as metaphor, model, system and practice, there is little to distinguish language, become binary, from reality, turned virtual, and nothing to separate genetic and digital creation from monstrosity. Technopoetics Code defines the entirety of postwar technological and consumer society, a new world order in which relations of knowledge, production, power and representation are totally reconfigured. Digital and biological, the metaphysics of code, in Baudrillards phrase, marks a shift from an industrial era of production to a period in which consumption, simulation and hyperreality predominate. New models of control are instantiated, doing away with transcendent values and human progress:
Cybernetic control, generation through models, differential modulation, feedback, question/answer, etc.: this is the new operational configuration (industrial simulacra being mere operations). Digitality is its metaphysical principle (Leibnizs God), and DNA is its prophet. In fact, it is in the genetic code that the genesis of simulacra today finds its completed form. (Baudrillard 1983a:57)
Informational and genetic, these models of control are extended throughout systems of government and economy: biochemistry hypostasises the ideal of a social order governed by a kind of genetic code, a macromolecular calculus by the PPBS (Planning Programming Budgeting System), its operational circuits radiating over the social body (1983a:59). It leads to social control by means of prediction, simulation, programmed anticipation and indeterminate mutation, all
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governed, however, by the code (Baudrillard 1983a:60). In operating like a complete biotechnological system, programmed, directed, organized, on strictly binary principles, the system appears to function like a homogeneous machine, its exchanges generating only an excess of the same. While it appears to inscribe a homogenizing, monologistic system, its functioning requires a constant injection of difference. At the end of Symbolic Exchange and Death, poetry surfaces as an insurrection against all forms of symbolic exchange. All sorts of apparently anti-economic features freedom, uselessness, wastage, expression associated with poetic discourses ruination of sense and meaning are seen to govern the repoduction of both material goods and the species itself (Baudrillard 1983:201). In the final chapter to The Illusion of the End an unverifiable poetic reversibility of events is hypothesized, a chaotic form distinguishing an endless ironized present from the illusion of linear history and social phenomena (Baudrillard 1992:120). Here poetry manifests a strange supplementarity in respect of the dominant code of contemporary hyperreality: because the inscription of code is not determined by anything outside itself there is no end in a teleological or finite sense to the endless escalation it demands. What appears, its excess and major effect in the order of simulations and code, is an obliteration of prior modes of operativity such as those pertaining to the morality, rationality and utility guiding bourgeois modernity. A postmodern capitalism thus no longer has the capacity to differentiate useful and useless economic activity or distinguish values in moral terms (Goux 1990). Anything goes as Lyotard comments, when it comes to the eclecticism of postmodern styles, anything going, esthetically speaking, as long as money is its lubricant (1984:79). An underlying and consumerist sameness governs information flows, as Norbert Wiener pointed out: More and more we must accept a standardized inoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white bread of bakeries, is made rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its food value (1954:132). There is a contant tension between a homogenizing trajectory and the the demand for innovation: the prevalence of clich s is no accident, but inherent e in the nature of information (Wiener 1954:119). Information, if it is to be considered information at all, must contain something unpredictable, new or surprising so that it functions as, in Batesons definition, any difference that makes a difference (1973:428). Without the continual supplementation of difference, information remains a circulation of the same, subject to entropic devaluation. For Wiener, commenting on the necessity of difference in information theory, the more probable a message, the less information it gives. Clich s, e for example, are less illuminating than great poems (Wiener 1954:21). Where everyday messages slide into a sameness and predictability that minimize informational currency, poetry, like noise perhaps, enhances its value. There is a kind of cyberpoetics at work here, a work neceassary to the renewal and complexity of the system, an internal challenge to the homogenizing tendencies of its own functioning. Indeed, a form of poiesis is crucial to any open, living system, as Maturana and Varelas combination of information theory and biology argues: they coin the term autopoiesis (a neologism, indeed, inspired by literature). For them, noise is not an excess that merely disturbs or disorients the system, as in MacKays definition: any uncorrelated disturbance which upsets the system by making it perform selections that were not intended (1961:5). Noise is crucial to
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the development of complexity in self-organizing systems: it is used adaptively and productively to stave off informational entropy and enhance complexity; it is thus crucial to autopoietic or self-making systems. The analogy has been extended further, taking cybernetic theory into analyses of cultural and literary forms to see the latter as the noise of culture:
the disorder, the noise of literary language can become information for us, can bring us to more subtle forms of understanding, because it is the unexpected, the radically different to which we can respond only because we are already complex beings capable of more complexity. (Paulson1988:99)
Through noise, the autopoiesis that defines living systems is united with the poiesis that traditionally forms the lifeblood of culture: a unity, however, established, not in nature, but on the plane of information theory. There is a poetics to the genetic code, one that, again, finds scientific practice implicated in the work of metaphor. In her cultural history of the genetic code, Lily Kay traces the way that cybernetics and information theory reshaped the sciences of molecular biology and inaugurated the thinking that turned code into the discovery of the book of life. There is a long history to this metaphor, like that of the book of nature, but the combination of information theory and biological sciences gave it new, and powerful, currency in the shaping of research: this metaphor of transcendent writing acquired new, seemingly scientific legitimate meaning through the discourse of information (Kay 2000:2). Genes seemed to carry an originary writing, one that was the basis of all life, as Thomas Sebeok proposes in his discussion of genetics and semiotics: today it is clear that the genetic code must be considered as the most basic semiotic network, and therefore as the prototype of all other systems of signification used by animals, including man (cit Baudrillard 1983a:59). But genetic code is neither a natural language nor a code, as Kay is keen to point out:
from linguistic and cryptanalytical standpoints, the genetic code is not a code: it is simply a table of correlations, though not nearly as systematic or predictive as the periodic table, for example, because of the contingencies, degeneracies, and ambiguities in the structure of so-called genetic code. (Kay 2000:2)
Language is similarly not a code, its plurality refusing the one-to-one correspondence that cryptography (or indeed empirical science) requires. When used in the binary context of computing or word processing, however, language is made to work like a code (Hayles 1999:30). Even Francis Crick acknowledged that the term code was technically incorrect and should be replaced by the more accurate cipher, but, he continued, genetic code sounds a lot more intriguing than genetic cipher . The appeal of the word code lies, not in any technical precision, but in its metaphorical resonance. For Kay, this preference for code rather than cipher manifests the poetics of the technosciences (Kay 2000:52). The contingencies, degeneracies, and ambiguities of code make it appear less like a code and more like a text. Discussing the usefulness of metaphors from cybernetics and language in genetic research, Kay argues that simple transcriptions of coding give way to a more complex play of Derridean writing: for even if the genome were to be a text and DNA a language, reading the Book of Life
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would be hardly ambiguous, for language is context-dependent and words are polysemic (Kay 2000:xviii). Noting the complex contextualization of genetic research in processes of protein folding, DNA sequencing, multicellular organization and epigenetic networks, Kay goes on: genetic messages might be read less like an instruction manual and more like poetry, in all their exquisite polsemy, ambiguity, and biological nuances (Kay 2000:xix). Where language, messages and genes are concerned, code as a transfer of terms from one system into another opens up a variety of signifying possibilities that diverge from straightforward deciphering. As Roland Barthes has suggested of the text, in the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered. He goes on:
the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceasely posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature . . . by refusing to assign a secret, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases reason, science, law. (Barthes 1977:147)
Writing, textuality, refuses the style of criticism that, while proclaiming its discovery, or deciphering, of the authors own meaning in the work, actually projects the critics values onto it, thereby, in the name of the Author-God, authorizing its own position through the retrospective identification of the Meaning in a retrospective and jubilant (victory to the Critic, writes Barthes) projection of one overriding metaphor, the one term that substitutes for the entire text. In contrast, the revolutionary liberation from (critical) authority frees the reader to read the text in terms of its playful multiplicity of connexions and relationships. The position, however, cannot be not grounded in a single or unifying figure. Meanings evaporation leaves only an open text, one wherein many meanings may be produced. It is not, then, an exact science legitimating one single practice or delivering a final, authoritative secret. The infopoetics of code and text addresses the con- and divergent questions of language, metaphor and technoscience. Concerns about the value and effects of code, information and software open two related trajectories for understanding the role of metaphor: one discloses older assumptions about the relationship between words and things in which issues of reference, nature and adequate description underline their difference; the other trajectory engages more problematically with the productive imbrication of signifiers and the world. Kays extensive survey of the exchanges between cybernetics and molecular biology documents numerous scientific promotions of or skepticism towards the association of genes and language. In the titles of numerous books, like George Beadles The Language of Life (1966), where the book metaphor is extended to describe genetics as the discovery of the Rosetta stone, or Robert Sinheimers The Book of Life (1967), the scriptural analogy is enthusiastically affirmed (Kay 2000:17). Others, like Marcel Florkin, remain critical of the value of the analogy as it becomes molecular biosemiotics (Kay 2000:27). Steve Jones employs the analogy quite readily and without any self-consciousness. Hence there are no quotation marks:

The language of the genes has a simple alphabet, not with twenty-six letters, but just four. These are the four different DNA bases adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine (A, G, C and T for short). The bases are arranged in words of three letters such as CGA or TGG. Most of the words code for different amino acids, which themselves are joined together to make proteins, the building blocks of the body. (Jones 1993:3)
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While the code metaphor can be used uncritically as a straightforward model, questions about its salience persist. James Griesemers examination of coding metaphors and genetic research interrogates the relationship in more critical terms. Opposing living and dead metaphor, it addresses the limitations of code in genetic theory and practice, noting the failure of the former to contribute to genetic solutions. Genes remain prisoners of the cell. However, the analysis of de Duves notion of a second genetic code enables a significant turn in the approach to work on the code metaphor: while the metaphor fails in respect of reference or descriptive validity when it comes to nature and biological reproduction, it retains its value as a model for mechanisms of scientific process, that is, it offers a way of understanding, not code itself, but the empirical practices of scientists involved in coding. Words and things remain in their separate spheres, crossing only in respect of scientific practice. The realm of nature is exempt from the effects of metaphor: though science becomes more wordly, more reflexive and metaphorically entangled, things of nature carry on doing their biochemical, evolutionary thing. In Griesemers analysis metaphor only entwines scientists and scientific practice as subjects and objects of the coding process. This neat move, which acknowledges the role of metaphor on one level while disavowing it on another, operates in the same manner as the shift in cybernetic research from the study of closed systems and feedback loops to self-organizing systems and noise. It corresponds to to the move made by Heinz von Foerster, in Observing Systems (1960), to second-order cybernetics; that is, the application of cybernetic principles to cyberneticists (Hayles 1999:10). The ambiguity in the pun of the title, in which living, open systems are capable of observing other systems and themselves as systems, brings science and its objects of study into close proximity: both are observing systems, subjects and objects of observation. The reflexivity introduced into scientific practice blurs boundaries between observation and natural process, word and thing. Indeed, when it is observed that observing systems have effects on the systems they observe Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle then the distinction between natural processes and scientific observations of them is indeterminable. Griesemers attempt to maintain some distance between metaphor and gene does not last long. The potency of the book of life metaphor, as Kay notes, demonstrates how discursive figures shape, direct and complicate practices as a way of knowing and doing (Kay 2000:xviii). Cybernetic theory historically served to reorient molecular biology and, at the same time fundamentally altered the representations of animate and inaminate phenomena (Kay 2000:5). Figures, metaphors, models and analogies have significant effects on the conduct of research and its findings: as discursive practices modes of articulating, representing, and intervening informational tropes and models guided the conceptualizations, interpretations, and material practices of the subsequent experiments to determine the other code words (Kay 2000:256).
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Metaphor, no longer mere linguistic ornamentation, has, it seems, moved well beyond literary parameters. Instead, generalized, it inscribes itself inextricably within science. Monstering metaphor Historically, metaphor has been made inimical to the language of science, its monsters being no more than fantastic, chimerical, imaginative and literary creations. The development of science in the nineteenth century is predicated on a division of language and literature. In his account of the configuration of biology, economy and language as a discursive formation of modernity, Michel Foucault analyzes the shift from Classical epistemology, based on a reciprocal kinship between knowledge and language, to a new modern relationship: the nineteenth century was to dissolve that link, and to leave behind it, in confrontation, a knowledge closed up to itself and a pure language that had become, in nature and function, enigmatic something that has been called, since that time, Literature (Foucault 1970:289). Language, demoted to the status of an object, was neutralized and polished in scientific usage so that it could become the exact reflection, the perfect double, the unmisted mirror of a non-verbal knowledge, and hence transparent to thought (Foucault 1970:2967). In compensation for the demotion of language, literature appears, reconstituted in an independent form, difficult of access, folded back upon the enigma of its own origin and existing wholly in reference to the pure act of writing (Foucault 1970:297). The dissolution of the links on which Classical epistemology was based, paves the way for modernitys separation of transparent and literary languages. Subsequently, with the onset of postmodernity, the dissolution of the distinction between language and literature signifies a crisis in modernity. To exemplify the second dissolution, Kays discussion of the use of the code metaphor identifies how rhetorical tropes intervene in scientific practices:
When applied metaphorically to biological phenomena information becomes even more problematic: it seems actually to restore its first sense as intelligence and meaning, but as such it violates the precepts of information theory, which supposedly legitimized the biological applications. It thus becomes a metaphor of metaphor, a catachresis, and a signifier without a referent. (Kay 2000:24).
Sliding into a process of unanchored, irreferential metaphorization, catachresis manifests a failure of language to stay in its place. According to Paul de Man, in The Epistemology of Metaphor, empirical philosophy has always been haunted and threatened by metaphor, tropes and figural language. Analyzing Lockes Essay Concerning Human Understanding, de Man argues that once the reflection on the figurality of language is started, there is no telling where it may lead. Yet there is no way not to raise the question if there is to be any understanding. The use and abuse of language cannot be separated from each other (1996:41). As a significant instance of an abuse of language, catachresis opens language to metaphoric play by mixing linguistic modes:
They are capable of inventing the most fantastic of entities by dint of the positional power inherent in language. They can dismember the texture of reality and reassemble it in the most capricious of ways, pairing man and woman or

human being with beast in the most unnatural shapes. Something monstrous lurks in the most innocent of catachreses: when one speaks of the legs of a table or the face of a mountain, catachresis is already turning into prosopopeia, and one begins to perceive a world of potential ghosts or monsters. (de Man 1996:412)
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The failure of metaphor to stay in its proper place and the resulting doublings of metaphor produce metaphorically in de Mans case a world of unnatural combinations. But when the failure and doubling of metaphor occur in scientific language, the deviation from proper use engenders different ghosts and monstrosities, ones that become palpable. There is a further concern about metaphor that emerges in the move from modern to hypermodern discourse, a concern evoked by the extent of metaphors failure to stay in its proper place. Not only does metaphor disturb the imagined consistency and transparency of scientific language, in a similar manner to the way it disturbs philosophy (Derrida 1982), its effects extend beyond language, letting monsters loose in the world. Kays discussion of the catachresis of the code metaphor suggests that more than a simple abuse of language is at stake, arguing molecular biology
used information as a metaphor for biological specificity. However, information is a metaphor of metaphor and thus a signifier without a referent, a catachresis. As such, it became a rich repository for the scientific imaginaries of the genetic code as an information system and a Book of Life were inextricably linked. Metaphors . . . are ubiquitous in science, but not all metaphors are created equal. Some, like the information and code metaphors, are exceptionally potent due to the richness of their symbolisms, their synchronic and diachronic linkages, and their scientific and cultural valences. (Kay 2000:2)
With information and code, not only does the work of metaphor become visible in scientific discourse monstrous enough but in its richness and potency it exerts effects on the direction taken by that discourse. When analogies are taken as ontologies, a significant reshaping occurs. In the case of biochemical uses of code, herediary material became informational, and the informational representations of the code were literally realized (Kay 2000:7). Strangely, it is catachresis that makes this possible. Kay argues that the information catachresis, as a double metaphorical construction of information, works productively, even inaugurally, to validate the representation of the genetic code as natural, eternal, and universal writing. The slippagges, ambiguities, paradoxes, and loss of referentialities create a space for the scientific imaginary and its projections of the genomic book of life (Kay 2000:34). Catachresis opens a space to be filled, its improper usage creating a new discipline, a hybrid formation composed of information theory and biology. A similar pattern is evinced in the conceptual formation of philosophy. Contrasting metaphor and catachresis, Derrida notes the latters foundational significance: where metaphor generally implies a relation to an original property of meaning, a proper sense to which it indirectly or equivocally refers, catachresis is a violent production of meaning, an abuse which refers to no anterior or proper norm. The founding concepts of metaphysics logos, eidos, theoria, etc. are instances of catachresis rather than metaphors . . . (1984:123). On the basis of an abuse of a figure of speech which is supposed to be merely decorative, an entire new science is born.
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Through catachresis, information theory transforms the scientific discipline that uses it, in the process changing the focus and direction of that discourse. In realizing its metaphor, moreover, information in-forms and re-forms the nature of the reality it theorizes, ceasing to remain mere metaphor in the process. The information metaphor works like the Derridean supplement: an extraneous term, smuggled in to genetic representations ends up reconfiguring the whole system (Kay 2000:239). What is tagged on, decorative, analogical or heuristic, becomes central in reconfiguring a discipline: different conceptions and directions are developed, new modes of practice and organization emerge, new patterns of understanding, knowing, acting on and shaping reality become available. Moreover, it is as catachresis, as an inappropriate use or abuse of metaphor, that code operates so effectively and creatively: its richness suggests a host of associations and further analogies, a variety of new lines of research and experimentation to be explored, all generated by the play of signification. Indeed, the fecund and productive effects of such an abuse of metaphor function, in the terms of information theory, like the negentropic noise that allows an open system to develop complexity: the misuse of metaphor, in straying from predictable but informationally poor associations, opens up new avenues for research that, though initially making little sense, are made to work. In engaging with this noise, as new and productive information, the system changes itself, reorganizing in more complex fashion around the innovations of metaphor. Catachresis, in which the deviations from propriety loose a host of monstrous figures, begins to causes a mutation in discursive practice itself: for Hayles, again using informational terms, mutation names the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction, marking a rupture of pattern so extreme that the expectation of continuous replication can no longer be sustained (1999:33). In crossing the line between literary and scientific discourse, between theory and practice, word and thing, the realization of metaphor begins to redraw the line itself. Unmaking metaphor With the catachresis caused by code metaphors, there is a hollowing out and refilling of scientific discourse, an evaporation and reconfiguration centered on information theory that reshapes scientific practice and beyond. Questions of code and information, of linguistic and scriptural processes, form and context, of metaphorical abstractions and embodiments, proceed in two directions at once: they return to familiar models and differentiations (between word and thing, material and conceptual, actual and discursive) and simultaneously head towards barely imaginable formations where such distinctions no longer apply. Current positions on code and information fall between the second and third orders of Baudrillards simulacra, that is between a productive nineteenth-century symbolic economy and the hyperreality of simulations. Discussing the end of dialectical evolution in Chance and Necessity, Baudrillard argues that Jacques Monods position reflects the ambiguity of all contemporary science:
its discourse is directed at the code, that is, at third-order simulacra, but it still follows second-order scientific schemata such as objectivity, the scientific ethic of knowledge, the truth-principle and the transcendence of science, and so

on. These things are incompatible with third-order models of indeterminacy. (Baudrillard 1983a:84)
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The gap between orders of simulacra is also the locus where the in-determinacy of and in metaphor is visible: in modernity its proper place lies in literary language, separated off from the transparency of scientific discourse. But in crossing that division it cedes to the work of simulations whose hyperreality knows no such boundaries: if language is not a code, as Hayles, following Lacan, insists, stressing the polyphonic chains of abstracted and embodied flickering signifiers, and code is not a code, as Kay contends in discriminating ciphers from polysemic language, then metaphor is not metaphor in its simultaneous institution and transversal of borders: its viral subversions, according to Baudrillard, evoke a metonymic, associative movement rather than a substitutive, metaphoric organization (1983b:7). This is the hyperreal play, the technopoiesis, in which esthetics, politics, sexuality, economics become confounded. Baudrillards interrogation of metaphor stems from the shifts put into effect by code. Sexuality cedes to genetic substitution and its linear and sequential reproduction, cloning, or parthenogenesis of little celibate machines. The body, once a metaphor of the soul then a metaphor for sex is no longer a metaphor for anything at all. It is merely the locus of metastasis, of the machine-like connections between all its processes, of an endless programming devoid of any symbolic organization or overarching purpose. The body forms the site of a pure promiscuity equivalent to that of circuits and networks (1993b:7). Cybernetics crosses the gap between orders of simulacra, establishing itself as a mode of articulation and reconfiguration by instituting information as an overall code defining contemporary hyperreal existence. In the indeterminacy between orders that is marked by catachresis and technopoiesis, homogeneity and play, pattern and randomness, rapidly circulate in arbitrary and unanchored fashion at the hollow heart of things, the very space where code inscribes itself as a new, in Kays words, scriptural technology. According to one of the less wellknown figures of cybernetic research Donald MacKay information science provided a kind of bridging language, making possible the exchange of ideas between a large number of disciplines (1961:26). Writing in 1961, MacKay, who emphasized, against Shannons dominant (and prevailing) insistence on the form rather than the content of the signal, the role of semantics and context in the transmission and reception of messages, underestimated the potency of informational metaphors. The bridging language was in effect a new universal language (a code embracing language, computers and genes). Stressing form and not content, the abstraction of information from a material context enables it to become free-floating and thoroughly decontextualized, an empty form that is readily exchangeable, transferrable and reproducible, and thus ideally suited to the networks of new economic organization. Hayles identifies a new episteme at work, one that transforms both bodies and representation:
the contemporary pressure toward dematerialization, understood as an epistemic shift toward pattern/randomness and away from presence and absence, affects human and textual bodies on two levels at once, as a change in the body (the material substrate) an as a change in the message (the codes of representation) (1999:29)
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Emptying body and nature as substance, leaves informational organization free to re-form and relocate identity and significance at an abstracted and decontextualized level. Marshall McLuhan grasped the unifying and transformative significance of the new technological arrangement in overcoming all linguistic divisions: today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity (1964:80). But the translation, occuring across codes and languages, has wider ramifications. Playing on etymology (on meta and pherein meaning to carry across or transport), McLuhans understanding of media is
concerned with all forms of transport of goods and information, both as metaphor and exchange. Each form of transport not only carries, but translates and transforms, the sender, the receiver, and the message. The use of any kind of medium or extension of man alters the patterns of interdependence among people, as it alters the ratios among our senses. (1964:8990)
Code is thus much more than the scriptural technology that was language: it is a complete technology combining an organizing framework or form of language and the technical capacity to materialize or realize itself, thereby changing things in the world. Paul Rabinow has noted the transformative power enabled by the postdisciplinary rationality of genetic research when combined with the increasing efficiency and accuracy of new technologies: the object to be known the human genome will be known in such a way that it can be changed (1992:236). He goes on: representing and intervening, knowledge and power, understanding and reform, are built in, from the start, as simultaneous goals and means (1992:236). Older distinctions are confounded and erased as the complete technology of code inscribes itself in and as reality. For Rabinow, technoscience heralds this possiblity: nature will be known and remade through technique and will finally become artificial, just as culture becomes natural. Were such a project to be brought to fruition, it would stand as the basis for overcoming the nature/ culture split (1992:242). The move to a hyperreality of simulation, of course, marks such a moment in that it identifies the point at which, in the production and inscription of images, the distinction between nature or reality and sign and representation has been superseded. Kay underlines the point, drawing out the interchanges that render conventional distinctions redundant:
When episteme and techne are seen as intertwined (thus rejecting the Greek logocentric legacy), the time-honored dichotomies between theory and practice, discovery and intervention, and observer and phenomenon are blurred. Technology and theory generate each other; epistemic things become technical things and vice versa, as Hans-Jorg Rheinberger has shown. (2000:36)
Differences between word and thing, fiction or theory and reality are elided. Mastery lies in the technological control and implementation of the word alone: genomic biopower promises new levels of control over life through the pristine metalevel of information: through control of the word, or the DNA sequence (Kay 2000:327). Where de Mans metaphors or catachresis may engender fanastically mutant figures in a poetic or linguistic realm, disturbing
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philosophical or empirical discourse, the monstrosities of code are increasingly able to realize themselves. In terms of informations transformation and dematerialization of the human body, the realization of code initially requires an abstraction or dematerialization from a physical matrix. This redefines humanity, rendering it mobile, and saleable: when bodies are constituted as information, they can be not only sold but fundamentally reconstituted in response to market pressures (Hayles 1999:42). Removed from any material stability, humans can be remade according to informational and economic principles. The freedom of the market that shapes this process, is not, however, so free, as to be outside of mechanisms of control. Kay, indeed, is careful to point to the way that the reformulation of information and biological sciences reshaped the problem of genetic specificity through a discourse that resonated with the technosciences of command and control (Kay 2000:150). Cybernetics, of course, developed out of wartime research. The new military-corporate order, indeed, pioneered research into the Internet. But its amorphous reach extends across the social sphere leading to what Kay calls a geneticization of society in which genetic information is reconfiguring our notions of self, health, and disease (2000:327). Control, however, is simultaneously uncontrollable: without material substrate, modes of judgment or heterogeneous principles like morality or reason, its aims are defined by technological efficiency and economic performance. Determination and control, homogenization and order, must remain open to innovations and creations that may optimize or enhance efficiency and performance, thereby depending on the aleatory and potentially productive movements of indeterminacy and play. The situation realized by genetic research and technological advance exemplifies the condition identified by Lyotard as postmodern. The collapse of modern boundaries, the crisis in the categories defining modernity, open a space for the emergence of a hypermodern formation in which the technosciences and their imperatives to optimize and maximize performance come to the fore. As Lyotard argues in his discussion of technoscientific language games and performativity, the reality that served as the legitimation of modern science is no longer in existence:
since reality is what provides the evidence used as proof in scientific argumentation, and also provides prescriptions and promises of a juridical, ethical, and political nature with results, one can master all of these games by mastering reality. That is precisely what technology can do. By reinforcing technology, one reinforces reality, and ones chances of being just and right increase accordingly. (1984:47)
With the technological capacity to master reality, like the mastery and rewriting of nature and the body by genetics, the rules of the game have clearly changed. The technological capacity to literalize metaphor, a realization, Lyotard writes, of the fantasy to seize reality, forms the crucial difference between the metaphorical operations of modernity and the operational mode of hypermodernity. Metaphors can now, it seems, literally realize themselves, rewrite reality and realize, perhaps, the host of monstrous possibilities once only metaphorically imaginable as an abuse of (scientific) language and practice. Art
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and science, creation and monstrosity, are shifted on to another plane. Having finally divested nature of her secrets and erased any distinction between nature and culture, life can be regulated and transformed by technological criteria alone. The evacuation of any grounds of differentiation be it moral, rational, utilitarian leaves a space open for the projection and realization of any fantasy, for any esthetics to make itself real. Poeisis finds itself aborbed within technoscientific practice, the metaphors that empirical discourse attempted to hold at bay becoming bound up in its creative enterprise. Such technopoiesis, however, in order to make and remake, to create and recreate, incorporates catachresis along with metaphor, the play of language coming to infuse its realizations with an inevitably monstrous potential. Postscript: future passed The development of genetic research, Kay suggests, offers a genealogy of the future (2000:328). For her, genomic textuality had become a fact of life and commercial futures, a metaphor literalized, with all the lumbering limits that this conflation of analogy and ontology entails for textual and material mastery of the book of life (2000:331). The future for which genes provide a genealogy assumes a very different form from that which accompanied the metanarratives of modernity. Its metaphors, too, undergo a transformation in which metaphor itself may be rendered redundant: a literal metaphor is, of course, an oxymoron. To literalize or realize a metaphor, then, is to cancel it out as metaphor, erasing it and the distinctions, of proper and improper usage, word and thing, fantasy and reality, on which it depends. A literal metaphor is a most monstrous metaphor, a metaphor that is not one, a misuse of metaphor that, unlike the abuse of catachresis, is utterly destructive. What replaces metaphor is a realm, a hyperrealm, of simulations oxymoronically engendering a circuit in which all modern distinctions are effaced, all oppositions cancel each other out or become interchangeable: metaphor and catachresis are realized on the same plane in this technopoiesis in which creation and monstrosity become indistinguishable. In the self-cancelling produced by its oxymoronic effects, the code that exemplifies the work of simulation confounds distinctions between nature and culture, analogy and ontology, episteme and techne, to leave neither one nor the other in their once proper place. At the same time it supersedes both at once, incorporating them onto its peculiar nondialectical plane of immanence. Simulation, with its viral (cultural/biological) and transversal circulations, leaves no borders intact in its unchecked crossings: metaphor, things, monsters, mutations are simply more simulations in its indiscriminate, indifferent exchanges. The genealogy of the future inscribed in genetic histories traces a past that is passed, passed, that is, not by modernitys linear narrative of events promising progress to come, but by an omnipresence of the present, a self-cancellation symptomatic of the obliteration of differences. The future collapses on a present that recycles and overwrites the past as it erases metaphor and monstrosity. Once, the future assumed a monstrous form outside narrative and normality; it retained an openness to uncertainty and the unknown. For Derrida,
the future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by species of monsters. A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future;

it would already be predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow. All experience open to the future is prepared or prepares itself to welcome the monstrous arrivant . . . (1992:386)
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In terms of genetics and information, the future of monsters and the monstrosity of the future are bound up together. When monsters are no longer monstrous, no longer surprising or unpredictable, what of the future? When, indeed, monsters are designed or programed, all risks assessed and all tests and therapies undertaken, can there be a glimpse of a future the otherness of which would hold any surprises at all? If the future is already prescripted in a book of life that can be read and rewritten according to the imperatives of technoscientific militarycorporate order, with all births and monstrosities coded on the same informational plane as no more than simulations that are optimizations or enhancements of prior simulations, then the future, like the metaphor of monstrosity itself, disappears on a horizon that is no more than a screen. Perhaps, contemporary culture is already too hospitable to monsters, too ready to welcome their arrival, too prepared, too eager to anticipate the simulated difference they may bring. Hence there is little left to engender surprise. In a present overdetermined by the realization of older metaphors, the fate of Frankenstein and his metaphorical genetic legacy exemplifies the condition of lving in the future passed. With Frankenstein old metaphors circulate readily, only exhumed, however, to ghost a context in which their significance has drastically altered. For Kay, the invocation of Faust provides an example of Frankensteinian presumption: if the genome stands for the origin of human life, then the Word the DNA sequence has brought molecular biologists as close to the act of creation as could be experienced, involving supernatural, Faustian powers (2000:37). The dream of scientific mastery, however, has been realized in new creative potential. Discussing an article on human cloning written for the New York Times in 1972, Turney notes that it ends with the observation that Frankenstein is no longer a fantasy. Moreover, the article concludes, in its realisation we no longer identify with Dr Frankenstein but with his monster (1998:180). The return to old metaphors provides some comfort, dispelling fears in giving recognizable form to new relationships, explaining developments the consequences of which are difficult to apprehend, their implications barely thinkable. But the misrecognition that casts new relations in familiar forms also acknowledges a change: no longer are humans positioned on the side of science as it appropriates the secrets of life in the mastery of nature. Instead, identifying with the monster, humans are aligned with all that can be made and remade by a more than human technology. Monsters once functioned to define the humanity invented by modernity, the species of nonspecies that differentiated the human from its others. Frankensteins monster, of course, was the one of the first to interrogate that relation. The monstrous interrogation of the limits of human identity, however, steadily erodes the difference; new biotechnologies render the distinction obsolete. In his cyberpunk version of Frankenstein, Bruce Sterling illustrates the changing roles of monster, scientist and human figure:
In this imaginary work, the Monster would likely be the well funded R&D teamproject of some global corporation. The Monster might well wreak bloody havoc, most likely on random passers-by. But having done so, he would never have been
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allowed to wander to the North Pole, uttering Byronic profundities. The Monsters of cyberpunk never vanish so conveniently. They are already loose on the streets. They are next to us. Quite likely WE are them. The Monster would have been copyrighted through new genetic laws, and maufactured world-wide in many thousands. Soon the Monsters would all have lousy night jobs mopping up at fast-food restaurants . . . This anti-humanist conviction in cyberpunk is not some literary stunt to outrage the bourgeiosie; this is an objective fact about culture in the late twentieth century. Cyberpunk didnt invent this situation; it just reflects it . . . Jump-starting Mary Shelleys corpses is the least of our problems; something much along that line happens in intensive-care wards every day. (1991:101)
With Research and Development teams becoming protagonists, Sterlings version has monsters fully incorporated, no longer Romantic exception or excess, but pervasive, banal and thoroughly recognizable figures. Monsters, indeed, are both our neighbors and ourselves, and, at the same time, mass-produced drones, wage slaves without prospects in the minimum pay sector of the service industry. No more than a fact of life, monsters are no longer an issue, their appearance as routine as operations performed daily in hospitals around the world to bring the dead back to life. Monsters, then, are the norm, familiar daily monstrosities extending from the floor cleaner to the patient wired up on the operating table, just variants of all the everyday folk who are prostheticized, surgically, cosmetically, chemically or, even, genetically (Clarke 2002:40). In a more banal fashion, high-tech Frankenstein, in another elison of creator and monster, is a figure for for the relation of humans online to machines (Poster 2002:2930). Monsters no longer render norms visible; they are the norm. Their modern function as unrecognizable figures evoking an awareness of norms, limits and transgressions, becomes redundant. In the process, of course, an extensive normalization occupies the horizon, an incorporation and assimilation of otherness that leaves little room for disturbing differences of any kind, a homogenization, a normalization in which norms have no limit nor boundary, nor meaning. In a discussion of the taxonomic disorder of hybrids in theory, Derrida introduces an important, even impossible, distinction between an oxymoronic normal monstrosity and a tautological monstrous monstrosity. The former includes theories which happily incorporate numerous elements of other theories or, in opposition, strategies of criticism which misrepresent and reduce the claims of radically disturbing modes of writing (like deconstruction itself) with caricatured dismissals. As usual, monsters are to be put down, monstered by legitimate positions. Monstrous monstrosities retain the older aspect of monsters, unpresentable, unrecognizable, unpredictable. They have a formless form beyond anticipation, recognition and legitimacy; they cannot be programed or presented as such: Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: Here are our monsters, without immediately turning the monsters into pets (1990:80). Our monsters, our pets. Our pets, ourselves. Normal monstrosity becomes the quotidien condition of hypermodernity. Monsters are everywhere and everyone. To be overfamiliar with monsters is to misrecognize the possibility of the monstrous. If a faint trace of monstrous monstrosity lurks in the general normalization of normal monstrosity, it is perhaps a sign, not of a new and singular birth, nor of some terrible event about to happen, but registers the
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absence of a future. This absence, however, provides the screen for the projection of a desire for a difference that will be unpredictable and surprising, a change that will betoken the possibility of a future. Hence monstrous monstrosity is sought out and misrecognized, eagerly anticipated and prepared for, so, when something appears, it is too readily seized upon, already too familiar, and thus quickly normalized as monster: if its possibility exists at all, the monstrous lies someplace other than where one expects to find it. And with so many screens embracing genes, images, information, and life in all its virtuality, it may be necessary to (not) look somewhere else.
Notes
1. Stephen Jay Goulds (1997) level-headed account of Frankenstein makes more careful discriminations between science, film and fiction and appears less anxious about the effects of fiction on the perception of scientific theory and practice. In contrast to Wolpert, Shelley does not get the blame: her fiction provides support for a balanced view of scientific debates in the way that it seems to articulate biological determinism and cultural development, melding the themes of inborn predisposition and shaping through lifes experiences (1997:60). Hollywood, however, receives sharp criticism for its reduction of science to only one theme: human technology must not go beyond an intended order decreed by God or set by natures laws. No matter how benevolent the purposes of the transgressor, such cosmic arrogance can only lead to killer tomatoes, very large rabbits with sharp teeth, giant ants in the Los Angeles sewers or even larger blobs that swallow entire cities as they grow (53). Literature is far sublter and nuanced in its handling of such themes, Frankenstein being neither a diatribe on the dangers of technology nor a warning about overextended ambition against a natural order (54). Indeed, citing Waldman from the novel, Gould notes how the awesome power of science is presented in a not negative fashion. While any endeavor, not science alone, may produce monstrous results, Gould finds Frankenstein entirely idealistic in his approach before identifying his moral failing (545). This appears in his uncaring rejection of his creation for reasons of literal superficiality (58). The monster is ugly.
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Dawkins, Richard (1996) Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, Edge, 1, http:/ /www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge1.html De Man, Paul (1996) Aesthetic Ideology, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Dean, Jason (2003) Recent Biotechnology Innovation Is a Bit Fishy, wysiwyg:/ /70/http://www.mongabay.com/external/glowing_fish.htm Derrida, Jacques (1978) Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Derrida, Jacques (1982) Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Derrida, Jacques (1984) Jacques Derrida in Richard Kearney (ed.), Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 10526. Derrida, Jacques (1990) Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and other Small Seismisms in David Carroll (ed.), The States of Theory, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 6394. Derrida, Jacques (1992) Passages From Traumatism to Promise in Elisabeth Weber (ed.), Points . . . : Interviews, 19741994, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 37295. Easlea, Brian (1983) Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists and the Nuclear Arms Race, London: Polity. Forry, Steven (1990) Hideous Progenies, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Things, London: Tavistock. Gould, Stephen Jay (1997) Dinosaur in a Haystack, London: Penguin. Goux, Jean-Joseph (1990) General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism, Yale French Studies 78, 20624. Griesemer, James (2001) What is Genetic About Genetic Coding?, paper presented at Code and Coding conference, Lancaster University, 11 November. Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) How We Became Posthuman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, Fred (1996) Cyberpunks in the White House in Jon Dovey (ed.), Fractal Dreams: New Media and Social Context, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 78108. Jones, Steve (1993) The Language of the Genes, London: HarperCollins. Kay, Lily E. (2000) Who Wrote the Book of Life?: A History of the Genetic Code, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark (1980) Metaphors We Live By, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Levy, Stephen (1992) Artifiical Life: the Quest for a New Creation, London: Jonathan Cape. Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1984) The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press. MacKay, Donald (1961) The Science of Communication A Bridge Between Disciplines, Inaugural Lecture, Keele University: 23 February, 127. McLuhan, Marshall (1964) Understanding Media, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Nottingham, Stephen (1999) Screening DNA, http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Stephen_Nottingham/DNA10.htm OFlinn, Paul (1995) Production and Reproduction: the Case of Frankenstein in F. Botting (ed.), Frankenstein: New Casebooks, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2147. Paulson, William R. (1988) The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Poster, Mark (2002) High-Tech Frankenstein, or Heidegger Meets Stelarc in Joanna Zylinska (ed.), The Cyborg Experiments, London: Continuum, 1532. Rabinow, Paul (1992) Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations, New York: Zone, 23452.
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Ricoeur, Paul (1991) A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Vlades, New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Ryder, Richard (1990) Pigs Will Fly in Peter Whale and Ruth McNally (eds), The BioRevolution, Cornucopias or Pandoras Box, London: Pluto, 18294. Shaikh, Thair (2002) Frankenstein Fish will Glow in the Bowl, news.telegraph.co.uk Shelley, Mary (1969) Frankenstein, ed. M. K. Joseph, Oxford: OUP. Sterling, Bruce (1991) CyberView 91, Well Gopher, 3(34), bruces@well.sf.c.us. Cit. Turney, Jon (1998) Frankensteins Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Virilio, Paul (2003) Art and Fear, trans. Julie Rose, London: Continuum. Wiener, Norbert (1954) The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Wolpert, Lewis (2001) From the Point of View of Prof Lewis Wolpert, http:/ /www.ytouring.org.uk/Pointsofview/Lewis%20Wolpert.htm Wolpert, Lewis and Richards, Alison (1988) The Never-Ending Story, http://www.fastol.com/ ~ renkwitz/the_never_ending_story.htm Wood, Gaby (2002) Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, London: Faber and Faber.
Fred Botting is Professor of Literature at Keele University. He is the author of many books, the most recent being Sex, Machines and Navels.

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Journal for Cultural Research

Metaphors and monsters

Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2003, 339365

Metaphors and Monsters

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