Re: [-empyre-] Re: Poetics of DNA II

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>]

Judith...

> I identify the DNA/gene as non-arbitrary and fixed only in the 
> limited sense that unlike language where there is no intrinsic 
> relation between signifier and signified, DNA at least has the 
> statistically significant tendency for its acids to pair only with 
> certain other acids.  This is not to say that what parts of DNA or 
> chromosomes may function as a gene is not flexible, nor widely 
> variant, nor that there is not a wide range of alternatives always 
> changing in the biosphere.

all IS change...  it is only in our re-presentations that we avoid 
change, and in that avoidance we sow the seeds of our quickening and 
dying...  a re-presentation cannot change -- once made, it is a 
static grasp at that-which-it-cannot-touch.

> I speak of determinism only on the molecular level.  I would suggest 
> that everything else is quite a complex moving open system.

the molecular being a reductive re-presentation of a complex changing system...

> There can be no such thing as empiricism as long as language is 
> involved in any stage or human observers intercede in measurements 
> that are made with tools requiring interpretation.  Social sciences 
> are particularly problematic in this regard since they often 
> envision issues of language and representation as countable 
> incidents based on protocols that do not take the vagaries of 
> representation itself into account.  Of course, not all of them do 
> this, but enough.

why don't all of of them take this into account -- or do ANY of 
'them' take this into account?  The account is spent in the sense 
that people who take re-presentation to be the 
thing/phenomena/action/activity itself are missing the 
thing/phenomena/action/activity itself...

> In so far as anyone ever conceived of DNA as a code, it was always 
> already paradigmatic, since Shroedinger referred to some agency as 
> that before DNA's structure was even discerned (an dby someone who 
> had read Schroedinger).  Calling DNA a code certainly does not 
> define how it functions, but the paradigm does condition how we 
> think about DNA--and how some scientists approached it--i.e. 
> "decoding."  DNA is not a code.  It is a chemical.  If we need an 
> analogy, cipher is the better one.

DNA is a re-presentation of a life-system that is still poorly 
understood except for its affects on the overall system.  A 
"chemical" is a re-presentative construct of an observed phenomena.

> Science in my usage refers to inquiries that pose and answer 
> questions premised on what investigators believe are physical 
> phenomena, answered often in mathemetical equations, and accounting 
> for the error of experiment.

isn't science the process of constructing self-reflexive 
re-presentations that are accurate within the knowledge-space 
where-in science holds sway?

cheers,
jh