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Manufacturing #16, Bird Mobile, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, 2005
An exhaustive application of human logic to all available routes -- the thread
Trial and error approaches a desired solution
Ariadne's thread blindly exhausts the evolutionary search space completely, never escaping
The obsessive replication of the unit for the illusion
Of the good of the many -- to celebrate that is to celebrate
The perpetuation of the social lie, and the illusion that
Pretending the destruction of the earth
Will be for the good of many is enough,
Enough -- while knowing that it will never be enough
To ensure the immortality of the unit --
Nothing on earth will ever be enough
Manufacturing #18, Cankun Factory, Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, 2005
China Recycling #20, Cankun Aluminum, Xiamen City, Fujian Province, 2005
Tanggu Port, Tianjin, 2005
Manufacturing #11, Youngor Textiles, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, 2005
Bao Steel #8, Shanghai, 2005
Urban Renewal #6, Apartment Complex, JiangjunAo, Hong Kong, 2004
Manufacturing #2, Shift Change, Yuyuan Shoe Factory, Gaobu Town, Guangdong Province, 2004
China Recycling #25, Cankun Aluminum, Xiamen City, Fujian Province, 2005
Replicators are not naked genes, though they may have been when life began. Nowadays, most of them are strung along chromosomes, chromosomes are wrapped up in nuclear membranes, and nuclei are enveloped in cytoplasm and enclosed in cell membranes. Cells, in turn, are cloned to form huge assemblages which we know as organisms. Organisms are vehicles for replicators, survival machines as I have called them. But just as we had a nested hierarchy of would-be replicators -- small and large fragments of genome -- so there is a hierarchy of nested vehicles. Chromosomes and cells are gene vehicles within organisms. In many species organisms are not dispersed randomly but go around in groups. Multispecies groups form communities or ecosystems. At any of these levels the concept of vehicle is potentially applicable. Vehicle selection is the differential success of vehicles in propagating the replicators that ride inside them. In theory selection may occur at any level of the hierarchy.
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I see the world as populated by competing replicators in germ lines. Each replicator, when compared with its alleles, can be thought of as being attached to a suite of characters, outward and visible tokens of itself. These tokens are its phenotypic consequences, in comparison with its alleles, upon the world. They determine its success or failure in continuing to exist. To a large extent the part of the world a gene can influence may happen to be limited to a local area that is sufficiently clearly bounded to be called a body, or some other discrete vehicle -- perhaps a wolf pack. But this is not necessarily so. Some of the phenotypic consequences of a replicator, when compared with its alleles, may reach across vehicle boundaries. We may have to face the complexity of regarding the biosphere as an intricate network of overlapping fields of phenotypic power. Any particular phenotypic characteristic will have to be seen as the joint product of replicators whose influence converges from many different sources, many different bodies belonging to different species, phyla, and kingdoms. This is the doctrine of the "extended phenotype."
Richard Dawkins: from Replicators and Vehicles, in Current Problems in Sociobiology, King's College Sociobiology Group, eds., Cambridge, 1982
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And again, there's the question of the corporate vis-à-vis the common. Latin would argue that the corporate is the imagination of a body, that may or may not have conjunction with other bodies. So it's to my mind an imagination of separating or singularizing an independent entity and function. Great corporations are -- not just imaginally, but would actually seem to be -- bodies, whose value is determined by function, that do increase to the largest magnitude of their potential to incorporate. And thus they have as limit only the breakdown of the bureaucratic, or the breakdown of the infrastructure that continues a relationship between all parts of this expanding condition. So it's not a common place, although many may be inside it, or thus be experiencing it. Then again, it's frequent, and it's certainly familiar. But is it commonplace? I guess that's really the question. Is it the case that humanly one always moves to make these bodies, or these embodiments of particular authority, need or function? Because they are embodiments, and thus not just their authority but their occasion comes from what they do. Whether they employ, or create, or make things, it's not -- I mean, it's finally not that they don't have an intent to make a car or a bottle -- but they don't necessarily have that as an end in view. They have the production of a sustaining input as their own limit.
Robert Creeley, in Tom Clark: Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place, 1993
Photos from China by Edward Burtynsky (via Edward Burtynsky Photographic Works)
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