Re: [-empyre-] Poetics of DNA II

[Eugene Thacker <eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu>]

Hi all...

Judith's opening remarks propose an intriguing reversal:

"If language and metaphor condition our understandings of DNA, then our
imaginary of DNA has started to condition our considerations of language and
metaphor.?

I like this because, first, it questions the assumptions that ?we? as
humanities-based STS scholars might take when looking at the construction of
technoscientific artifacts. Not that I profess faith in the unqualified thing-
in-itself, however. But if metaphor and materiality are always intertwined, then
it would make sense to consider how DNA ? which, we should remember, is a
compounded entity that is at once biological and informatic, wet and dry ? is
not simply an example or a subset of metaphor, but itself a correlation of thing
and idea, the gooey ?stuff? of life and all of its heightened significations.

That something like DNA is at once posited as such, and yet remains in some
sense hermeneutically inaccessible (e.g. in terms of what the book-of-life or
the code ?means? etc.), then doesn?t this imply that DNA, that most loquacious
of molecules, is actually quite inert, mute, and silent?

What would a ?negative theology? of DNA be like? Neoplatonic and early Medieval
thinkers often asserted a negative notion of the supernatural or the divine ?
that one could not state positively what the divine was (God or Being is X or Y)
but could only signify that which was beyond signification by a process of
negation (God or Being is not-A or not-B, if A and B stand for attributes such
as ?corporeal? or ?temporal?).

How about this ? negative DNA as something like a ?flat code? ? that is a code
that at once asserts its own informational verbosity and yet at the same time
withdraws into the arcana of ?complexity? and the avalanche of numbers (e.g.
genomics as a data management problem).

-Eugene




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Eugene Thacker, Associate Professor
School of Literature, Communication & Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology

eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu
http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~ethacker
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