The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

Edges 117
tension, duration, and intensity of the illnesses prevalent in a population....Death
was now something permanent, something that slips
into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it.” 18 It is
clear that, in this context, there is no end to biological security; its
job is never finished and, by definition, can never be finished. If there
is one site in which the state of emergency becomes the norm, it is
this site of nondistinction between war and disease, terrorism and
endemic.
Network Being
Information networks are often described as more than mere tools or
relations, but rather as a “global village” or a “collective consciousness.”
What is it about networks that impels us to describe them as
somehow being alive? For Heidegger, however, the question of being
and the question of being alive are two different things. Too often an
inquiry of being alive presupposes the self - evident existence of being.
The fields of anthropology, psychology, and biology begin their analyses
on the question of “life itself,” its modalities and characteristics,
its laws and behaviors, its properties and taxonomies. Rarely do they
ever inquire into the existence as such of “life itself,” the almost confrontational
factuality of the being of life (what Levinas described as
the impersonal “horror of the ‘there is’ . . .”). As Heidegger notes, “In
the question of the being of human being, this cannot be summarily
calculated in terms of the kinds of being of body, soul, and spirit which
have yet first to be defined.” 19
But it is precisely this question that the sciences of life jump over,
in favor of exclusively anthropomorphic inquiries of psychology or
biology. “Life itself ” is always questioned, but the existence as such of
life, the being of life, is not regarded as a problem. Such knowledge—
as in the life sciences—thus continues with an assumption of having
understood the very existence as such of living beings. One begins
with Darwinian evolution, with developmental genetics, with studies
of biological morphogenesis, with the genetic factors in health and
disease. “The ontology of life takes place by way of a privative interpretation.
It determines what must be the case if there can be anything
like just - being - alive.” 20 The life sciences thus become, in this