Abstract: This article examines the DNA-based biopoetry of Christian Bök in relation to its antecedents in the art-science experiments of Joe Davis, Pak Chung Wong, and Eduardo Kac. In particular, I develop an ecocritical analysis of the process of encipherment at the center of their works. Wong encoded lyrics from the song “It’s a Small World After All” within the DNA of a bacterium. Similarly, Kac employs encipherment in Genesis, a project aiming to demonstrate that “biological processes are now writerly.” In the same way, Bök’s The Xenotext: Book 1, published in 2015, involved enciphering poetry into the genome of the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. The organism’s cellular mechanisms “read” the encoded poem and produced a protein, the structure of which was then deciphered, resulting in another poem in response. In relation to these works, I ask the following: are biopoetry and the encipherment process merely conceptual and methodological experimentations, or do they reflect ecological consciousness and ethical imperative for life? Building on Foucault’s idea of the discourse of nature and Benjamin’s notion of a language of things, I explore how The Xenotext—and biopoetry more generally—reinscribe the power/knowledge relations implicit in the long-standing tropes of nature as a book, code, or cipher to be unraveled. Constructed as an inherently mute subject, nature is willed to speak purportedly on its own terms but through conspicuously human media and in inescapably androgenic terms. An ecologically directed evaluation of biopoetry ultimately affirms the indebtedness of all literary production, including biopoetry, to other-than-human lives and bodies.
While the origin of biopoetry tends to be attributed to the late 1990s work of bioartist Kac (b. 1962), a number of influential mid-twentieth-century precursors and events have impacted the course of the genre. Building on the 1980s advent of digital poetry and the personal computer as both a compositional tool and a writing environment, Kac devised the term biopoetry to signify “poetry in vivo” that makes “use of biotechnology and living organisms in poetry as a new realm of verbal, paraverbal, and non-verbal creation.” Similarly, in the same manifesto, he proposes the idea of transgenic poetry to denote the possibility of a practice of writing based on synthesizing DNA for constructing words, sentences, and sequences of poetry in correspondence to nucleotide combinations.
At the center of biopoetic works is the process known as encipherment and its pivot to genetic coding. The term cipher derives from the Old French cifre, for “nought or zero,” and signifies the mathematical symbol for absence of quantity or value. In the 1520s, cipher first came to denote, in English, a secret manner of writing involving a coded message. Accordingly, cipher refers to “a cryptographic system in which units of text of regular length, usually letters, are transposed or substituted according to a predetermined code.” In a modern context, a cipher is an algorithm for performing encryption—or encipherment, a less common synonym—and decryption. The cipher of modern genetics is foreshadowed in the Pythagorean belief in numerical codes as integral to unlocking—or decrypting—the perceived phenomena of the world.
Regardless of the technically elaborate (though, for general audiences, largely cryptic) process developed, the tenor is unavoidably human: for instance, the distinctly Western modes of melancholic internally rhyming alexandrine and Petrarchan sonnets. Perhaps it is a matter of the poets’ claims making. Construing a bacterium and the biological processes of which it is part as writerly or a poem in itself as a microorganism or vice versa could strike discordantly with the pataphysical domain of playful linguistic experimentation and conceptualism. For Benjamin, “there is no happening, no entity in either organic or inorganic nature that does not participate in some sense in language.” Recognizing the immanence of expression in all things, he argues against the reduction of the language of things to mere human language or to convenient metaphor. Rather than being etched in the architecture of language as we exercise it, the language of things exists at the limit of the sayable and nameable. One might, then, wish to know, impatiently, the nature of the language of D. radiodurans, other microorganisms, and other-than-human forms of life for that matter.