[-empyre-] Poetics of DNA II

[Judith Roof <roof12@comcast.net>]

Greetings To All Comers (and with thanks to Nick for devising this)

The Poetics of DNA: The Evacuation of Representation

Although a notion of the “poetics of DNA’ would seem to suggest that  
language and representation are quite powerful, the other side of  
this formulation is a contemporary trend towards evacuating  
representation itself.  There is no more art, nor ambivalence, nor  
ambiguity, nor anything other than a machinic transmittal of true  
meaning/”reality”/matter.  Representation has become a vector without  
meaning of its own. Modes of representation (language, narrative,  
image, etc.) are regarded by many as merely transparent and pragmatic  
vectors by which the authentic, the factual, or even the True are  
unproblematically conveyed.  The vagaries of language disappear in  
favor of the delusive truth of the empirical whose communication has  
miraculously overcome its medium. We now favor memoir over fiction  
and worry when an autobiography turns out not to be “true.”  If  
language and metaphor condition our understandings of DNA, then our  
imaginary of DNA has started to condition our considerations of  
language and metaphor.

The desire to locate DNA and genes as a nonarbitrary and fixed  
substratum accounting for all biology (as well as all social,  
economic, religious, and artistic impulses) represents a displacement  
of complexity, uncertainty, and multivalence into a delusional other  
language in which “A” finally and unequivocally equals “A”.  Of  
course biochemistry is neither an alphabet nor a language nor are  
traits singular and definable entities governed by singular genes  
(nor are they actually often a "trait" at all, whatever that is). The  
impetus to so simplify, however, still regularly haunts news reports,  
popular conceptions of  biochemistry, and more comprehensive notions  
of “science” itself.  And now, in a curiously reflexive reversal,  
such automatonism affects our concepts of language, narrative, drama.

Last week in a film theory class I teach, a bright student suggested  
that film theory is irrelevant, since all things aesthetic,  
narrative, and imagistic are already genetically programmed. We do  
not, he suggested, need to struggle with conceptions of how film  
works as a complex mode of representation.  The answer is clear.   
Films are the way they are because that’s the way our brains are (and  
not the way Hugo Munsterberg meant it when he proposed the idea 90  
years ago).  Our brains are that way because it is all already in our  
genes. The answer to all of the niggling enigmas of film theory is  
that film is genetic (a few steps beyond the causal reductions of  
historicism).

The student’s belief in the ultimate biological materialism of  
representation takes the final turn of a full circle in which  
language, narrative, and metaphor condition what we believe about  
biochemistry, which then partly influences the kinds of research and  
understandings that are accomplished, whose reporting in the original  
recycled metaphors then reinforces apparent materialization of those  
metaphors, which by now have become truisms, which then promulgate  
ways of thinking, such as my student’s, by which language, narrative,  
and metaphor become the tethered and predictable products of the more  
certain and happy genetic universe for which they are (in a far more  
figurative way) partially responsible.

This result is all too easy and ironic in a world that eschews  
complexity and grasps even more desperately towards singular truth,  
“reality,” and reliable signifiers. Of course the representation/ 
science binary is false, but it exists firmly enough to enable the  
one to take the hit for the other.  That representation (language,  
image, narrative) becomes the sacrifice suggests not a turn towards  
science or logic or any recognition of biochemical complexity, but  
rather a turn away from uncertainty, complexity, and systematicity  
displaced into representation as that set of practices that can be  
brought to heel by simply ignoring that there is any ambiguity over  
which we might ever puzzle.  In this world “A” does equal “A,” but  
the tautology short circuits all of the ways of thinking that might  
be valuable.

The foreclosure of representation as a complex ambiguous, uncertain,  
yet material (in the sense that it can produce the operative yet  
immeasurable) force may well be an effect of grief over the loss of  
the kinds of indexicality that represented presence, the fading  
predominance of structures (and structuralist ways of thinking) that  
signaled control and regularity, and the rapid dissolution of even  
airline-based gauges of temporal/spatial relations, among other  
epistemological warpings.  Or the evacuation of representation may  
compensate for the nearly incomprehensible complexity of  science--of  
cellular biochemistry in league with quantum theories, for example.  
The more non-figurable these processes become, the more transparent  
we believe the figurative to be.

Judith Roof