Cloning and the Genetic Code

Definition

Cloning and the genetic code are, for Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation, 1981/1994, "Clone Story"), the culmination of the body's reduction to information — the point at which reproduction passes from sex to the "matrix." Cloning is "the materialization of the double by genetic means": "No more mother, no more father: a matrix. And it is the matrix, that of the genetic code, that now infinitely 'gives birth' based on a functional mode purged of all aleatory sexuality." It abolishes the subject, alterity and the mirror stage together: "The subject is also gone, since identical duplication puts an end to his division. The mirror stage is abolished in cloning, or rather it is parodied therein in a monstrous fashion." Against Benjamin's account of mechanically reproduced art, cloning is "the most advanced, the most modern form of this development… in which the original no longer even exists, since things are conceived from the beginning as a function of their unlimited reproduction." The body becomes "a stockpile of information and of messages, as fodder for data processing," its genetic formula "the prosthesis par excellence." The concept's pathology is cancer: "The code designates the smallest simple element, the minimal formula to which an entire individual can be reduced"; cancer is "a proliferation ad infinitum of a base cell without taking into consideration the organic laws of the whole." "The metastasis that began with industrial objects ends with cellular organization." Cloning is continuous with the wiki's double — but where the classical double was imaginary, the clone is its materialization, and with materialization comes the end of seduction. See the-double, simulation-hyperreality, mirror-stage.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: cloning as materialized double, the matrix in place of the parents, cancer as the pathology of the code (1981/1994).
• Walter Benjamin — the theory radicalized: mechanical reproducibility extended from the artwork to the individual.
• Sigmund Freud — the double's psychoanalytic genealogy, which cloning materializes: "heimlich/unheimlich."

Related Concepts

• The Double — the imaginary figure cloning materializes: "the immortal double by genetic means."
• Simulation / Hyperreality — the condition in which the body becomes information.
• Mirror Stage — abolished by duplication: with no division, no identification.
• Authenticity — what cloning forecloses: "no possibility of a return to an original being."
• Posthumanism — the adjacent contemporary register of the informationalized body.
• Hologram — the companion case: the double materialized optically rather than biologically.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the defining source ("Clone Story"): "no more mother, no more father: a matrix"; "The mirror stage is abolished in cloning"; cloning as the limit of Benjamin's reproducibility; cancer as "the pathology of the code."
• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the prehistory: the robot/gadget as object-automaton, the "cancer of the object."
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).
• source-notes/baudrillard-1983-fatal-strategies

Open Questions

• Baudrillard treats cloning as the logical terminus of a tendency, not as a free-standing technology (the essay concedes "it is probable… that even the 'clonic twin' will never be identical to its progenitor"). Is the concept therefore a diagnosis of a tendency rather than of an empirical technology?
• The "genetic code" is Baudrillard's name for one of the two "fundamental codes of deterrence" (with the satellite). Is there a distinct architectural form of the code — the software-controlled building? (See parametricism, computational-design.)
• Cloning abolishes the subject and the mirror stage; does that make the concept ungendered, given that the wiki's gender-and-the-interior and mirror clusters insist on the mirror's gendering?