non-organic, the material with the non-material, revealing therewith its techno-biological or post-biological character. Humanitarian thinkers have long become accustomed to concepts with the prefix “post-” (poststructuralism, postindustrialism) and associate specific content with them. The “post-” element is key to all of them – it includes an indication of a superhabitual form that leaves itself, which it is unable to name and thus simply limits its previous meaning. In postbiology this limitation is added to the main criteria under which biological essence is understood. According to these criteria, its existence and the speed of its evolution is determined by the physical inseparability of the genotype (information on the species) from itself. But the postbiological object, on the other hand, contains signs of both a living organism and a technical product. The sum of these properties allows it to attain the breakneck speed of evolution through entering information about its reproduction beyond the organism itself. All these qualities of metabolae – the metabolisation of the non-living, transformability alongside the preservation of distinctiveness, integration founded on differentiation – help us go from the consideration of an observed object’s status “living/non-living” – to a consideration of the role these materialized dynamic systems play in the space of relations. In other words, we are trying to understand the phenomenon of the existence of a new medial environment “at the edge of chaos”, of duality and fluctuation when we use metabolic processes to create links and relations that create the unity of the non-living in the assembly. The main medium for research here is synthetic matter, and the main issue at hand is the “living” aspect, the ability of expression, the reserve of existing possibilities we can discover from within that “non-living” dimension.
The Technological Unconscious as a Medium Reflections on the physical medium and its message, on medial space and its signs do not begin from an analysis of the specificities and conditions of producing various types of surrogate matter. The history of European thought has seen endless polemics over that subject, first principle or substance which prefers to remain hidden behind the external manifestations of the world. “Do you ask from what it’s made of – earth, fire, water etc? Or do you ask, ‘what is its pattern?’” – this is just one of the ways of asking the classical question about reality. And while traditional thinking on “being” asked about the general logos or the pattern standing behind natural phenomena, contemporary media theory is focussed on that which lies beneath the semiotic surface – where signs, like the physical 12