Life (Vitalism)

This entry is about the concept of vitalism. The currency of vitalism has reemerged in the context of the changes in the sciences, with the rise of ideas of uncertainty and complexity, and the rise of the global information society. This is because the notion of life has always favoured an idea of becoming over one of being, of movement over stasis, of action over structure, of flow and flux. The global information order seems to be characterized by ‘flow’. There are three important generations of modern vitalists. There is a generation of 1840–45 including Nietzsche and the sociologist Tarde; the generation of 1860 including the philosopher Bergson and the sociologist Simmel; and the generation of 1925–33 including Deleuze, Foucault and Negri. Vitalist or neo-vitalist themes are particularly useful in the analysis of life itself, but thinkers such as Donna Haraway and Katharine Hayles put things in reverse. They understand not the media in terms of life, but life in terms of media. Thus a mediatic principle or algorithmic principle also structures life. If classical vitalism conceives of life as flow and in opposition to the structures that would contain and stop it, then neo-vitalism would seem to have its roots in something like a media or information heuristic. Thus there is talk today that ‘information is alive’. © 2006, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.