[-empyre-] Mediated Matters and design abjections

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

realizing the discussion is invited to move on (by Adam's post today),  I still hope Oron will follow up his initial postings and perhaps expand on the notions of regenerative biology
and designing life that he brought here.  Am not sure how they relate to "deep time", as Adam suggests, and I am also not convinced that we can draw easy parallels between the first
and second weeks' subject matters.....
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What's intriguing to me is how much the conversation is an elaboration of last week's developing discussion on urbanization [Adam]
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Could you refine how you see 'urban data politics' related to the modes and "modalizations" of life, as Manchev may imply that side of biology/biotechnology --  introduced by Oron or projected by the quasi-critical designs of bioartists who investigate growing cultures or tinkering with cells, at the genetic level  --  when critiquing the politics of plasticity.  For those who were interested in my reference to Boyan Manchev's writings but could not track the german text, i found an english translation from a Slovene translation ("Odpor plesa", Maska 25 [2010], pp. 9-19), and cite a paragraph from the opening pages of that text on modes of life: 

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Forms of Life as commodities

The society of the spectacle undoubtedly complies with technology-based, post-industrial capitalism, its logic of production as well as the modern logic of representation: it is the outcome of hyper-technologization and functionalization, codifying life and prescribing processes of subjectivation, which are nothing less than forms of subjugation. The new model up for debate, as it surpasses the model of developed modernity, introduces a completely new commodity to the game: the forms of life itself. In reference to Debord’s definition of the society of the spectacle, one could define this new model as “capital accumulated to the point that it becomes a form of life”.

But first, in what sense can the term ‘life forms’ be used? The term has the fundamental task of introducing a different notion of life, which implies that there is no essentially determined life, only life forms, or rather modes of life: Life is the modalization of life... 

Traditional capitalism was based on the notion of growth: Working more efficiently and producing more meant an increase and expansion of leisure time for autonomous life beyond commerce, thus creating more space for forms of life that do not conform to the rules of any market. The distinct quality of the new model, in contrast, lies in the attempt to absorb the subject’s modern autonomy by taking over the sphere of privacy. Philosophically speaking, this means taking over the sphere of possible experimentation with different modes of subjectivation, life and alternative human interaction, in short, the sphere that is the actual site of ‘human existence’.

The new model thus takes over the ‘un-producible’, totalizing the range of the market.... 
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regards
Johannes Birringer
dap