least take the biological seriously as important elements of affect which cannot be
either wished away, shoved into a box marked ‘naturalism’, or made secondary to
the social. These associative currents of work subscribe to the view that the
biological is not something different in kind from the social but is an integral part
of the business of building collectives. But they also index the rise of ‘biosocieties’
which include all manner of industries based on the manipulation of heritability
and explicit biological engineering of various kinds (e.g. bionanotechnology),
the direct manipulation of body parts via procedures like transplantation, and
now xenotransplantation, the number of public currents of concern that refer
to biological issues, from the treatment of farm or laboratory animals through
concerns about genetically modified organisms through to all the different means
of cohabitation that have now become apparent, and the consequent proliferation
of social imaginaries that now refer to the biological as constitutive. In other words,
this work tries to lay out reasons for the urgency and heat of affect and how it
effects what we have too easily named as the social.
The first current of work is concerned with a direct revaluation of the biological,
a revaluation which has been going on for some time now. Led by an evolutionary
momentum which derives from three chief sources – the debate around culture
and evolution, the debate around animals, and the rediscovery of the process
philosophy of Whitehead – this work has been going back to first principles, and
especially the intersection between evolution and culture, in order to discover what
it means to be human if human is understood as process of situated flow within
which human bodies are just one of the sets of actors. It is no longer possible to
avoid this fulcrum of activity, with all its undoubted historical baggage, since it
both speaks to a time in which biopower has become biopolitics (Lazzarato 2002a)
and because the questions now being raised by biology press on that knot of
interests formerly known as the social.
Thus, the first debate attempts to understand culture as a part of the biosphere,
as both caught up in evolution and as a vital part of evolution, giving ‘cultural
evolution its due weight without divorcing culture from biology’ (Richerson and
Boyd 2005: 1 7 ). Such a renovation of Darwin’s ‘inherited habits’ has become
much easier to countenance as it has been realized just how quickly biological
adaptation can take place in humans, as in other animals, not only through so-
called gene-culture co-evolution^6 but also through epigenetic traits. In other
words, not only human behaviour but also anatomy,^7 broadly understood, is labile
with the consequence that the ‘superorganic firewall’ (Richerson and Boyd 2005:
17 ) between the social and the biological has been breached, thus bringing both
categories into question, as well as underlining how the same environment can be
used in radically different ways. In turn, the sheer complexity of cultural variation
has become ever more apparent as a force in evolution. There is much more to
heredity than genes (Jablonka and Lamb 2005). Three examples, all but one drawn
from Levinson (2005), will suffice. One is that cultural knowledge about the
environment makes it possible to build a larger population as, for example, when
cultures accumulate a myriad of successful and adaptive experiments with different
kinds of foods. So, for example, the appearance and diffusion of cooking is now
226 Part III