The Code of Life

Bregtje van der Haak, a Board member of the Prince Claus Fund and a renowned cultural analyst and film-maker speaks to The Blog about her forthcoming documentary The Code of Life.

Why the title "The Code of Life"?

The Code of Life refers to the fact that biology and information technology are merging into one huge, new field of analysis. With the latest generation of DNA scanners and super computers, any organic material (blood, skin, saliva, flowers, flies, bacteria etc) can now be cheaply 'sequenced', transformed into code and processed as digital information. Once life is viewed as a code, it can be analyzed and improved using the language of mathematics and algorithms. The young scientists working on genomics in China believe that the secret of life itself is embedded in the genetic information contained in each living cell. They are inspired and fascinated by the fact that they are uncovering previously inaccessible layers of information about the essence of life. At the same time, their own lives are also clearly affected by things that can not be so easily understood in mathematical terms, such as falling in love, loneliness and family expectations. This widening gap between life as information and life as a messy and unruly bag of feelings, family ties and cultural influences, interests me. It is clearly reductive to see life in mathematical terms only, but it is also unwise to ignore the major shifts in techno-science, because they will unavoidably have a major impact on culture, society and politics and eventually affect all of us. My hope is that the advances in techno science will be accompanied by informed public debate, new theory and empirical research by social scientists.

Can you give us the reasons that led you to explore the topic for this documentary film?

When I was working at the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong last year, I was struck by the strong future orientation and optimism of my Chinese students. They embrace new technology in playful ways and seem to believe that they can improve everything, including themselves, just by trying, working hard, and then trying again. They are very supportive of each other and do not give up easily on anything. This is very different from my recent experience in Europe. When I read about a genomics institute in Shenzhen, which had become the leading DNA sequencing facility in the world in only two years time, I was fascinated. When I read that an 18-year old boy was leading the research team to uncover the genes for human intelligence, I wanted to make a film about it. My interest as a filmmaker is in showing how the world is changing. Technology itself does not interest me, but I am drawn to it intuitively when it starts to intersect with society and lived experience. There is also a strong visual drive. When I first visited BGI, the pale colors struck me as very beautiful and I felt dwarfed by the scale of the building, an old shoe factory at the outskirts of Shenzhen. Cinematically, it resonated, because it felt like Blade Runner, science fiction. But ultimately, I think the reason to make this documentary is that my personal experience in Hong Kong raised many questions for me and made me want to understand this new world more deeply. BGI seemed a place where a lot of 'newness' was concentrated, not only the super computers, DNA sequencers and cloning labs, but also Chinese family ties, the framework of a market economy ruled by an authoritarian state, and the focus on very young talent. BGI employs 3000 very young bio-informaticians, a profession that did not exist ten years ago. Altogether, it provides a new model that forced me to rethink a lot of things and I hope it will have that effect on viewers as well.

Why is China so hooked up on these types of almost post-human experiments?

The advance in genomics is by no means an exclusively Chinese phenomenon. Genetic researchers from all major research institutions in the West are collaborating with BGI in Shenzhen and paying for sequencing services. Shenzhen is one of the Special Economic Zones in China where the market economy is thriving. Because China has a planned economy, it can shift resources to new fields quite easily. Biotechnology and information technology have been identified by the Shenzhen government as growth industries and BGI has received a rent free building and a 1.5 billion USD interest free loan to buy up the best technology in the world. When I started working on the film, I thought that ethical guidelines would be less strict for cloning and DNA research in China, but in fact they are quite similar. Cloning human beings is strictly forbidden in China, as it is in the rest of the world. 

However, there are cultural differences. When you have been raised in a Christian culture, you would probably not say in front of a camera that the cloned micro pigs are ‘life that I have created under my microscope'. In Europe and America, the idea that we can 'create life', bypassing God as the exclusive creator is still very controversial, also among non-believers. That's why stem cell research and animal cloning are difficult. The cloning department at BGI in Shenzhen has been founded by a Danish professor, who could not get sufficient funding to bring his research to the next level in Denmark. His best Phd. students were Chinese and he was happy to go to China with them to establish the largest cloning facility in the world under his leadership.

What do cases such as those you examine in this film tell us about the future of nature?

The future of nature is artificial and man-made. The convenient separation of the world in 'nature' on the one hand and 'culture' on the other hand can no longer be maintained. Technology is human and therefore 'natural'. It is not outside us, but part of us. It is also inseparable from our landscapes now. Once we accept that technology is part of us, we can we start to talk about how we want to use it. If the scientists in Shenzhen will find the genes for IQ, pharmaceutical companies will get involved. They will try to make drugs that improve cognition and design tools to select embryos with genes for high IQ. In the future, babies might be born smarter because of these technologies. Of course, new technologies are expensive and most people will not have access to them. New inequalities and discrimination will arise and new battles will result from them. The political philosopher Michael Sandel has tried to draw a line between technology that is meant to cure nature's mistakes and technology that aims to improve on nature's work. He proposes to allow the first category and to limit the second. Although I tend to agree with his ambition, I think reality will be different. Once technology is available, people will find ways to buy it whenever they can afford it and feel they need it. Animal cloning is already thriving in China, Australia, Brazil and India, because it allows farmers to breed better meat at lower prices. We are living in a global market place and regulation for new technologies is always behind and usually too late to be effective. The global financial crisis has demonstrated this once again. We are heading into an increasingly chaotic global capitalist mining field, where everything of value will be extracted and the rest will be left behind. There are currently no powers or institutions capable of changing or regulating this. We can only do it ourselves.

If we doubt ourselves, who will have belief in us?

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Assistant Professor of science, technology and society the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, speaks to the JWTC Blog.

Bruno Latour's work was very much at the center of the debates during the 2012 JWTC roundtable on 'Things of Nature|Nature of Things'. What, from his thought on nature/objects/things, should in your view be amended as he moves South?

Bruno Latour is obviously beginning to catch fire in the Global South. He is probably the next Foucault. Before Foucault there was, of course, Marx. One of Foucault’s most serious readers in African studies, V. Y. Mudimbe, has lamented the persistence of a “Western ratio” at the center of African thought. Mudimbe states very clearly that Foucault, despite his brief sojourn in North Africa, was not writing for or about Africa but (specific) Western societies. Nor was Marx; same for Latour.

We should, therefore, be cautious about what is universalizable about them; that does not mean they are not intellectually usable material. Even in Western academia, Latour has been criticized for his “executive approach” that privileges the lab engineer or scientist. This applies to actor network heuristics in general. My fear is that people bringing Latour or Science and Technology Studies (STS) into African Studies are simply going to trace the itineraries of Western artifacts derived from the labs that STS described, the infrastructures and thought systems transplanted to Africa from them, and make this the be-all end-all of science and technology in Africa.

 If that were to happen, my fear is that there will be no investment in investigating African modes of sciences and technologies—or the very idea that they exist. Latour does not have a formula for nonwestern ways of knowing (science) and means of doing (technology). Uncritical discipleship to him will be a trap because it saddles one with that baggage of theoretical insufficiency.

 What would be in your view the most efficient use of Latour and others in the African context?

I would urge that we critically utilize Latour as a methodology for writing narratives in humanities and social sciences, viz., to take seriously the role not just of humans but also nonhumans as actors (or actants), as heterogeneous actors in the making of the social.

He wants us to pay attention to the process through which things come to be constituted. And one would say Africanists have always been too human-centric or social-constructivist in their narratives, with animals, the physical environment, and technology as mere anecdotes, wax in people’s hands, or simply nuisances and hazards. Foucault made Africanists even more social constructivist. Two nonhuman elements, technology and ‘nature,’ are quite central to Latour’s analysis. The former constitutes some kind of Western idolatry—Western society is crazy about technology in the hi-tech sense - which means we must question what ‘technology’—alongside ‘experiment,’ ‘science,’ ‘nature,’ ‘environment,’ etc.—really mean in the context of African people’s lived realities.

Are you suggesting that we go beyond some of the foundational dualisms that have been so central to our craft?

Yes, definitively. The division between nature and culture (and spirituality) is tenuous to say the least in the African context. By contrast, Western orders of knowledge, since Hobbes and Boyle, follow a distinct Fact vs. Faith, Reason vs. Religion, dichotomy. In African contexts, this tradition of thought confronted another in which faith and religious structure anchor and inspire fact and reason - one that, like most Global Southern cultures, was more concerned with the whole (earth) than the bisected parts. Vivisection did not have a life of its own; it acquired purpose and meaning within the whole, hence as Joseph Needham remarked once, if one went into Chinese society looking for Science, one would not find it; only sciences.

Whereupon one might ask: As China expands into Africa, Africans into China, and as books get translated from Chinese to English, what might the growing collection of Chinese texts tell us about systems of thought similar to pre-European African modes, now that Western modes of thought have been around and are familiar to us? Is it time to expand our intellectual vista so that we no longer always have to look to Western philosophy for grounding our theories? Why must we always gain universality by looking West?

Should modes of theorization emerging from the South necessarily aspire to be "universal"?

Erudition in front of global audiences, or the desire to impress, should not drive our theory; it should be for the right reasons.

We speak with more strength, authority, and originality if we can tap into registers emergent from local creativities, and if we exercise patience in developing our ideas.

It should not be about taking the theories of others and running with them. Our own material can gain universal reference. We should endeavor to make ourselves aware and read in the registers of others, but never aspire to become miniature others, merely good imitations of Foucault, Latour, or Derrida. The exercise shouldn’t be one of wholesale consumptionism. The goal of literature reviews must always be as precursors to stating our own positions, not making them our own.

Our problem is always that we need to be like them in order to gain universal appreciation. I think we can speak from here with tools from here about materials from here and still acquire universal validity. Subaltern Studies did this.

How do you explain the poverty of theory in 'African studies"?

Any culture of writing and knowledge production emerges out of a specific moment or inspiration. Ours was the Hegelian framing that gave us no history. We were mere hostages to nature, mere moments in the Eurasian passages through space. Even nature (especially the wild) had history. We did not, unless we were part of the wild (hence my ambivalence about the concept of ‘nature’ or ‘the animal’). So it had to be a social history and anthropology searching for empirical evidence, as much of it as possible, wherever it could be found, to prove we had a history too.

My experience of ‘philosophy’ in university was of a syllabus on Thucydides, Socrates, and other foreign people—never about my ancestors’ proverbs and other idioms or their technological achievements, like Great Zimbabwe which, in any case, had been attributed to foreign construction. Until we take idioms generated from here seriously ourselves, they will always be caricatures to and of others.

It could be that the colonial system of education had no interest in making us thinkers. Our failure to decolonize our education system and foster a new way of training students to think and innovate, to be creative beings and not just potential employees, to move beyond a system where we were supposed to be only ‘baas boys’, good only at taking instructions instead of thinking critical, is the biggest liability we confront.

Spaces for creative thinking must therefore be utilized wherever they may be found, and our youth encouraged to take a kind of creative recklessness toward received registers. Governments and universities can facilitate the creation of these spaces.  Africa’s vast intellectual pool at home and abroad has enough networks now that could be marshaled into spaces of intellectual ferment—right here on the continent.

Any thoughts about the future of critique in Africa?

Originality and self-belief will be critical as we move forward. It is as if we are not confident to think we can stand on our own feet if we think and speak like Africans and engage the outside as such. If we doubt ourselves, who will have belief in us?