RE: [-empyre-] Poetics of DNA II

[Jim Andrews <jim@vispo.com>]

A fascinating topic: 'DNA Poetics'.

I have read of the rise of Isamic, Christian, and Jewish fundamentalism
described, in part, as a reaction to the complexities of the contemporary
world. What does that mean? How can it be seen as a 'reaction to the
complexities'?

Complexity is not forbidding when education on the matter is available. But
when education fails, as it is failing currently, when good education is
only available to the monied, complexities become feared as does whatever we
do not and cannot understand. 'Cannot' because that knowledge seemingly
belongs to a different class/a different culture.

In the absence of access to the unravellings of complexity education
affords, in the absence of access to those 'codes' and belief systems,
fundamentalist religion fills the void, provides its codes. Codes of
conduct, of belief, of divine causality. All you need, really. The Bible or
Koran as having been written by God. The truth.

But Judith's comments on "a world that eschews complexity and grasps even
more desperately towards singular truth, “reality,” and reliable signifiers"
are not about fundamentalist influence on contemporary thought but a more
far-reaching incapacity to approach complexity reasonably. She describes a
kind of sophomore 'DNA fundamentalism' where "DNA and genes [are
(delusionally) imagined to be] a nonarbitrary and fixed substratum
accounting for all biology (as well as all social, economic, religious, and
artistic impulses)" .

DNA and genetics as all we need to discover the Truth. Not the Bible or
Koran as the code of Truth, but DNA as the code of Truth.

My own perspective on the topic of 'DNA poetics' comes from my interests in
writing, programming, and mathematics. If the most captivating and
consequential scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century concerned
physics, concerned the nature of atomic and sub-atomic particles and the
forces and energies operative therein--the fierce chemistry of the sun--it
seems that more recently, we are less concerned with the constituents of
matter as the constituents of life and the processes of life. And with this
has come a concern with language and codes: DNA; the way the brain stores
and processes information; and the way that machines can store and process
codes/language/information, these being strongly related to how our own
biology do these things.

When we discover the way the brain stores and organizes information, will we
discover that it has its own 'languages' for this? Or is the term 'language'
inappropriate here? Is it more a matter of 'codes'? Similarly, concerning
DNA, is there some sort of 'language' there or, again, is the term 'code'
more appropriate? Can there be 'language' without it having been formulated
by sentient beings? Is sentience or possibly natural language the limit of
machinic process or, respectively, code as complexity approaches infinity?

With the work of Godel in the thirties and Turing in the forties and
fifties, the study of language and languages was radically altered. The
theory of computation is all about the properties of languages, but the
notion of 'language' in the theory of computation is, fundamentally, a
set-theoretic notion. Looking at my copy of 'Language and the Theory of
Computation' (a computer science textbook), I see a 'language' is simply
considered as a set of strings made up of symbols.

In this sense, the theory of computation 'evacuates representation'. That
phrase, 'the evacuation of representation' is an interesting one Judith
uses. The theory of computation evacuates natural language of familiar
meaning and studies the formal properties of languages as sets of strings
subject to rules of concatenation/combination.

This is, of course, an unfamiliar way to look at language. And its value,
its insights, basically concern the ways in which information/code/language
can be stored and processed by machines. Additionally, Godel and Turing gave
us some startling insights into the limits of the abilities of formal
knowledge systems to 'know it all' or 'do it all'. Additionally, the
computers and computer languages that the theory of computation has hatched
as applications of the theory, of course, have as many uses as there are
conceivable machines; computers can simulate any conceivable machine,
including ourselves, possibly.

'DNA poetics', to me, is not just poetics of biology, but of
information/code/language, and involves our humanity and language both at
the biological and cultural level.

Just as Darwin's ideas, 150 years later, are unavailable or incomprehensible
or heretical to the majority of people on our troubled planet, the
complexities of 'the language/information  transformation/revolution'--with
its involvements in both the theory of computation and biology--seem doomed
to remain exotic, incomprehensible, distant bodies of knowledge for a long
time to come. Instead, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,
education flags, complexity is feared, and codes as simple as
fundamentalism--religious or not--gain power among millions of people.

All this while scientific and cultural breakthroughs proceed at a brisk
clip.

Good education must be for all.

ja
http://vispo.com