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The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

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Edges 127<br />

player online games, and so on). <strong>The</strong> body becomes a medium <strong>of</strong><br />

perpetual locatability, a roving panoply <strong>of</strong> tissues, organs, and cells<br />

orbited by personal network devices.<br />

Divine Metabolism<br />

Despite, or because <strong>of</strong>, the popular notion <strong>of</strong> information as immaterial,<br />

information constantly relates to life - forms. Life - forms are not<br />

merely biological but envelop social, cultural, and political forms as<br />

well. Life - forms are the nondistinction between these. Life - forms<br />

posit the polyvalent aspect <strong>of</strong> life, all the while positing something,<br />

however inessential, called “life.” <strong>The</strong> foundation <strong>of</strong> no foundation.<br />

Life has many aspects (social, cultural, economic, genetic), and not<br />

all <strong>of</strong> those aspects have an equal claim on life—that is the attitude<br />

<strong>of</strong> the life - form.<br />

But life - forms are also the opposite: the production <strong>of</strong> a notion <strong>of</strong><br />

“life itself,” a notion <strong>of</strong> life - forms that is unmediated, fully present,<br />

and physical. This notion <strong>of</strong> the “thing itself ” acts as the foundation<br />

<strong>of</strong> life - forms, the point beyond which “life itself ” cannot be more immediate.<br />

Paradoxically, this is precisely the point at which the morethan<br />

- biological must enter the frame. Life - forms are similar to what<br />

Marx called the “inorganic body”: “Nature is man’s inorganic body—<br />

nature, that is, ins<strong>of</strong>ar as it is not itself the human body. Man lives on<br />

nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain<br />

in continuous intercourse if he is not to die.” 30 But despite his acute<br />

analyses, Marx is ambiguous over whether the inorganic body is something<br />

other than non - or preindustrial society. Even if we take the<br />

inorganic body broadly as “environment,” we are still left with the con -<br />

tradictory separation between individual and environment.<br />

Nevertheless, this is the nascent biopolitical aspect that Marx left<br />

unexplored—the relation between metabolism and capitalism, between<br />

what he called “social metabolism” and political economy. We<br />

leave it to Nietzsche to respond: “<strong>The</strong> human body, in which the<br />

most distant and most recent past <strong>of</strong> all organic development again<br />

becomes living and corporeal, through which and over and beyond<br />

which a tremendous inaudible stream seems to flow: the body is a

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