Abiopolitics of the Archive

Charting a course from postwar cybernetics to contemporary data science, this paper explores DNA’s dual role as a molecule of heredity and an archival substrate for the digital age. By encoding exogeneous text into DNA, scientists repurpose life’s replicative mechanisms for non-biological preservation, challenging the boundary between living and non-living archives. Connecting Jacques Derrida’s account of archival an-archy to methods in contemporary data science, this paper interrogates DNA storage as a site and expression of a new techno-biopolitics, or abiopolitics.