Re: [-empyre-] Poetics of DNA II

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

Hi all?

Okay, I?m going to be a bit curmudgeonly, although I basically agree with
Judith?s remarks:

?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...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.?

It seems to me that a great deal of STS work surrounding genetics, biotech,
molecular biology, and so on seems to fall back on the rhetoric of ?the open.? A
number of posts have already hinted at this.

If one actually looks at the contemporary research coming out of, say, the Santa
Fe Institute or in journals like Complexity or even The Journal of Theoretical
Biology, you see both an interest in DNA as a molecule as well as an
understanding of its inherently complexity in a network of relations (e.g.
biopathways, applications in network science, intersections with a-life
research, even systems biology). But this is nothing new ? in the 1970s C.H.
Waddington already was thinking about a systems-based approach for theoretical
biology, itself inspired by the inter-war work of Bertalanffy. The point is that
for a long time there has been a great deal of biochemistry and molecular
biology research that has been implicitly about complexity and against any form
of reductionism.

Now, I don?t think that Judith is accusing the sciences of being reductionist ?
for that itself would be reductionist. But I think there is a tendency to adopt
a kind of liberal, even romantic stance towards these issues, to appeal to the
romanticism of complexity, which often is a metonym for the potential or the
possible or the open, or the mysterious. I call it romantic because it brings to
mind the kind of philosophy of nature that one finds in the early Hegel and
Schelling, which privileges the dynamics of the organic whole over an analytics
of mechanical parts (sorry, that?s a shoddy summary of some dense work, but oh
well?). There?s something interesting, then, in thinking about a genetic or
biochemical Lebensphilosophie, and perhaps this would be a way to connect this
romanticism of complexity with the actual scientific research in biocomplexity,
self-organization, etc.

-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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