Re: [-empyre-] Poetics of DNA II

[Nicholas Ruiz III <editor@intertheory.org>]

Interesting...is the claim here that Enlightenment
rationality and the dream of certainty continues
(despite poststructuralism, deconstruction,
etc.)forward in its march as the dominant
epistemological figuration of the real...?

NRIII



--- Judith Roof <roof12@comcast.net> wrote:

> Greetings To All Comers (and with thanks to Nick for
> devising this)
> 
> The Poetics of DNA: The Evacuation of Representation
> 
> Although a notion of the ?poetics of DNA? would seem
> to suggest that  
> language and representation are quite powerful, the
> other side of  
> this formulation is a contemporary trend towards
> evacuating  
> representation itself.  There is no more art, nor
> ambivalence, nor  
> ambiguity, nor anything other than a machinic
> transmittal of true  
> meaning/?reality?/matter.  Representation has become
> a vector without  
> meaning of its own. Modes of representation
> (language, narrative,  
> image, etc.) are regarded by many as merely
> transparent and pragmatic  
> vectors by which the authentic, the factual, or even
> the True are  
> unproblematically conveyed.  The vagaries of
> language disappear in  
> favor of the delusive truth of the empirical whose
> communication has  
> miraculously overcome its medium. We now favor
> memoir over fiction  
> and worry when an autobiography turns out not to be
> ?true.?  If  
> language and metaphor condition our understandings
> of DNA, then our  
> imaginary of DNA has started to condition our
> considerations of  
> language and metaphor.
> 
> The desire to locate DNA and genes as a nonarbitrary
> and fixed  
> substratum accounting for all biology (as well as
> all social,  
> economic, religious, and artistic impulses)
> represents a displacement  
> of complexity, uncertainty, and multivalence into a
> delusional other  
> language in which ?A? finally and unequivocally
> equals ?A?.  Of  
> course biochemistry is neither an alphabet nor a
> language nor are  
> traits singular and definable entities governed by
> singular genes  
> (nor are they actually often a "trait" at all,
> whatever that is). The  
> impetus to so simplify, however, still regularly
> haunts news reports,  
> popular conceptions of  biochemistry, and more
> comprehensive notions  
> of ?science? itself.  And now, in a curiously
> reflexive reversal,  
> such automatonism affects our concepts of language,
> narrative, drama.
> 
> Last week in a film theory class I teach, a bright
> student suggested  
> that film theory is irrelevant, since all things
> aesthetic,  
> narrative, and imagistic are already genetically
> programmed. We do  
> not, he suggested, need to struggle with conceptions
> of how film  
> works as a complex mode of representation.  The
> answer is clear.   
> Films are the way they are because that?s the way
> our brains are (and  
> not the way Hugo Munsterberg meant it when he
> proposed the idea 90  
> years ago).  Our brains are that way because it is
> all already in our  
> genes. The answer to all of the niggling enigmas of
> film theory is  
> that film is genetic (a few steps beyond the causal
> reductions of  
> historicism).
> 
> The student?s belief in the ultimate biological
> materialism of  
> representation takes the final turn of a full circle
> in which  
> language, narrative, and metaphor condition what we
> believe about  
> biochemistry, which then partly influences the kinds
> of research and  
> understandings that are accomplished, whose
> reporting in the original  
> recycled metaphors then reinforces apparent
> materialization of those  
> metaphors, which by now have become truisms, which
> then promulgate  
> ways of thinking, such as my student?s, by which
> language, narrative,  
> and metaphor become the tethered and predictable
> products of the more  
> certain and happy genetic universe for which they
> are (in a far more  
> figurative way) partially responsible.
> 
> 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. Of course the
> representation/ 
> science binary is false, but it exists firmly enough
> to enable the  
> one to take the hit for the other.  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.  In this world ?A? does
> equal ?A,? but  
> the tautology short circuits all of the ways of
> thinking that might  
> be valuable.
> 
> The foreclosure of representation as a complex
> ambiguous, uncertain,  
> yet material (in the sense that it can produce the
> operative yet  
> immeasurable) force may well be an effect of grief
> over the loss of  
> the kinds of indexicality that represented presence,
> the fading  
> predominance of structures (and structuralist ways
> of thinking) that  
> signaled control and regularity, and the rapid
> dissolution of even  
> airline-based gauges of temporal/spatial relations,
> among other  
> epistemological warpings.  Or the evacuation of
> representation may  
> compensate for the nearly incomprehensible
> complexity of  science--of  
> cellular biochemistry in league with quantum
> theories, for example.  
> The more non-figurable these processes become, the
> more transparent  
> we believe the figurative to be.
> 
> Judith
> Roof_______________________________________________
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