Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

We can here glimpse the whole question of the relations between

genetic and epigenetic codes, between the molecular structure of DNA

and the development of the organism.

Language and life

Biogenetic research shows how the formation of the organism (the

essential process of biology) can be described as a linguistic process, as

the encoding of matter by a kind of linguistic program.

A new paradigm of a bioinformational sort has seemed to emerge

from the convergence of information technology and biotechnology.

In the first place, this happens because the computer is indispensable

for reading and archiving the molecular sequences that compose

the organism’s programme. But there is also a deeper analogy between

language and life, between phenomena of communication and of

epigenesis.

The matter from which organisms are made seems to be penetrable

by the substance of signs (or better, by signs understood as substance).

DNA possesses this double characteristic, of being at the same time

substance, organic matter and sign. It is a programme that replicates

itself in the organism’s matter, that governs processes of interpretation,

and that can be read by a computer only because the organism can

read it too. Language presents itself here in its double articulation, as

representation but also as matrix.

A semantic level, as in linguistics, appears in the protein’s sig-

nification in the cell, specifically its function (which is not directly

visible in the sequence of amino acids, like the signification of a

word is not visible in its writing or in its pronunciation). The rules

for rewriting the genetic patrimony from DNA to the proteins are sum-

marized by the correspondence of the genetic code.(Antoine Danchin,

La Barque de Delphes, 29, our translation, emphasis in the original)^6

It is the correspondencebetween the sequences of nucleotides and those

of the amino acids, which changes the operating level of the physical

entities from that of the nucleic acids to that of the proteins, that

makes it possible to use the metaphor of a program when we talk of

the formalcontent of DNA. The physical creation of an individual

organism is determined by the consequences of the expression of its

genetic program, carried out by those ‘manipulating’ objects the pro-

teins (which are in particular capable of manipulating the very

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