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_______________________________________________
empyre forum
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