Re: [-empyre-] Poetics of DNA II

[Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>]

Hello all,

I have followed the discussion for the last couple days with this 
thought growing in my mind:

The reciprocally determining connection between what some (for example, 
HW) are calling "science" and others (for example, Judith Roof) are 
calling "representation" appears to me to be an endless spiral. For 
sure, the most interesting and often the most productive science is 
marked by a constant process of experimental falsification, leading to a 
fresh questioning of the models and measures on which previous 
experiments were based. But that re-evaluation is not necessarily 
immediate and indeed, the operative model may in the meantime be used to 
build quite a lot of technology, while also being extended 
metaphorically as an explanatory or representational structure for other 
processes or realities with which it has no specific links whatsoever.

So, in the case of our discussion here, some speak of DNA as "code" 
(NRIII), using the information-theoretical concept that differentiates 
absolutely between information and whatever channel is used for its 
transmission. This model of information was very productive for genetic 
research, and the notion of DNA as code has become so common that some 
humans view each other as walking computer programs. However, if I have 
correctly understood the science columns in the newspapers, the 
expression of each gene has recently been found to be not solely 
dependent on the information in the DNA "code," but also on other 
processes in the proteins of the cell (I do not have precise knowledge 
here, so anyone who does could explain this). In other words, in this 
case the "channel" apparently contributes something to the "code."

What I am wondering, then, with respect to Eugene Thacker's remarks on 
"openness" and " romanticism," is this: just as poetry has long been 
conceived as an excess over semantics, is there not an excess of the 
genetic process over our model of DNA as code? And isn't this kind of 
excess or openness a stimulant of the continual work of 
reconceptualization and re-evaluation that disjunctively links the best 
science to the elusive "things" that it tries to grasp? Finally, 
wouldn't it be interesting, for other representational needs as well, to 
begin moving beyond, or at least relativizing, this model of "code" 
which has perhaps outlived some of its usefulness and productivity - 
particularly in its application to so-called natural languages?

Excuse me if I make no sense, I am not a scientist and I don't know much 
about DNA.

best, Brian