Re: [-empyre-] Re: Poetics of DNA II

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

Hi all ?

I apologize in advance for this mess!...trying to sort out some of the points
raised in the past week?

There seems to be a tendency in some of the comments to somehow move ?beyond?
the informational understanding of DNA specifically and molecular biology
generally. I don?t know if I?m right in sensing this, but if it is the case,
then it seems like what is needed is not just a replacement of the trope, but a
displacement of the entire conceptual apparatus. This is how I understood
Judith?s comment, and Brian?s question:

Judith: ?In the same way that theories of information have enlarged conceptions
of the material, so detaching concepts of language and code from the field of
the signified potentially expands the operational value of language (of any
kind) as a biological factor--and not just an effect of biological processes.?

Brian: ??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??


So, one approach would be searching for possible alternatives to replace the
DNA-as-code concept with another trope that is more complex, more flexible, more
open, and so on. And there are plenty of precedents for this, both historical
and current (I believe George Gamow posited a ?diamond-code? back in the late
1940s, more recent attempts to liken DNA to the I Ching or musical notation,
etc., perhaps ?bioart? is a part of this endeavor too...).

But this would simply reinforce the overall conceptual apparatus, which,
historically speaking, is a hybrid of linguistics and information theory/
cybernetics. It would just replace the terms without altering the structure. Add
to this the dimension of the general semantics of DNA-as-code in culture, and
you get the problem alluded to by Judith:

?DNA is always and never what we make it--as John suggested the chemical is also
a screen  and point of focus occulting yet other processes and sites already
envisioned as simultaneously scalar and inaccessible, repeating infinitely down
the line.?

At this point, I wonder why were are talking about DNA at all. I?m only half-
joking when I say that we might as well be talking about ?Life? or ?Being?
instead.

Clearly one factor is the multiple understandings of terms like ?code? and
?information,? as several posts have noted. ?Code? means one thing in computer
science, something else in molecular genetics, something else in cultural
studies, something else in linguistics, etc. (In fact, as historians like Kay
and Rheinberger have noted, this sort of creative misunderstanding was at the
root of the appropriation of ?information? by Watson, Crick, et al. ? whereas in
the mathematical-engineering concept a la Shannon, semantics is largely
irrelevant, for geneticists it is crucial, for even single base pair mutations
can have significant consequences for the organism.)

I get stuck here, for there seems to be a kind of correlational impasse beyond
which it seems difficult to move:

- One correlation is between the concept of ?DNA-as-code? and the assumedly
material, physical thing to which it refers. On the one hand DNA is a thing, but
information is not a thing, so we have a thing that is no-thing. But even the
DNA as a thing is complicated ? is it the gooey stuff in the test tube, the
double-helical model that you build in lab, the textbook diagram of the base
pairs, or simply a string of data?

- Another correlation is between DNA-as-code and the various actions or
functions which it is said to perform. Here a key issue is causality and action.
Crick?s central dogma implied a causal agency, but this view has, as I
understand it, been radically modified since his time. But causality and action
still have to be accounted for, hence the problem of ?molecular action? becomes
a problem not only for the sciences (e.g. systems approaches) but it also
overlaps with the almost ideological valences that such agency has (e.g. if DNA
is both inert and passive how can it be ? even in a purely cultural sense ? the
?code of life??).

Both of these involve a thinking about a concept which has two complimentary
components which, while they are distinct from and even opposed to each other,
cannot be thought independently from each other. But they are also co-relational
because they are asymmetrical ? one side always threatens to liquidate the
other. Thus the concept of DNA-as-code always threatens to liquidate the thing-
itself beneath the weight of language, representation, and signification.
Likewise with DNA-as-actor and DNA-as-action; the actor always risks taking
priority over the action itself, just as the thing is presumed to exist prior to
its relations and processes.

One option is to think about what the overall representational notion of DNA-as-
code doesn?t allow; what does it foreclose to thought? Well, it certainly seems
to foreclose either straight-up idealism or empiricism. These options seem
absurd, ridiculous. And maybe, for this reason, interesting. DNA-as-code is
purely noetic (and thus, in a way, equal to thought) or DNA-as-code is purely
material (and thus part of a noumenal, inaccessible world ?out there?)...

-Eugene