Assembling desires: Synthetic biology and the wish to act at a distant time

Abstract

Wonderful living things such as biological clocks, sensors, living cameras and switches are often presented as iconic designs in synthetic biology. The wonderfulness of such living things resides in their performative powers: they ‘count’, ‘memorise’ or ‘imprint’, and they do so by living. This paper explores design in synthetic biology. It follows a basic biological part, a BioBrick construction, situating it as an element of more complex socio-technical assemblages. The paper explores how living designs in synthetic biology are stabilized and given credit. Rather than producing static matters of fact, synthetic biology turns the dynamics of life itself into a matter of design. Arguably, living designs in synthetic biology displace the epistemic focus, moving its referential anchoring from ‘back’ in reality to ‘ahead’ in the future or from the natural organism to the possible living thing. A will to act at a distant time is inscribed in the living wonderful things of synthetic biology. The paper proposes a number of ways in which action is displaced towards the future within synthetic biology designs: as recursive innovation, potentiality, technological acceleration and anticipatory action. Matters of design in synthetic biology are justified on the premise that wished-for futures can be realized.