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

["Dirk Vekemans" <dv@vilt.net>]

Hi, 

Very interesting all this, I have been reading it with glowing ears. Please
allow me a bit of a simplifying glide over the terrain here, I'm trying to
understand and perhaps you could straighten me out a bit as to my
assumptions.

As i understand the matter at hand the key problem here is to remain within
the compounds of reason, the immanent if you want and still establish a
beyond where language fails. My science is no good, but as a poet I might
have to offer some hunches as to the poetics involved.

Why a beyond if we need to stick to immanence?

 Why the need to stick to immanence in the first place? In my view it is the
best guarantee that any resulting technological garbage that is produced in
through these creative investigations ( i would insist on putting science
and general creativity on the same plane here, not one of attributed value
but one of a more neutral consistency; poetic creative work produces the
garbage of text-production or material painting or whatever media the poetic
algorithms are forced through just like investigative science produce text
and technological achievements, a usefull allegory at least if it can't be
put to work as an analogy with more than just metaphor in it) cannot be
later be misconstrued in any teleological fashion: any transcendence
sneaking in will also bring in the human tendency towards a master plan and
I think it is pretty clear by now that such a plan can only resemble a truly
impressive schematics to a Global Death machine. These are big words, and
they go straight to the heart of even the most philosophical of inquiries
but as Eugene suggested I don't think such depths can be avoided if most of
us are to acquire at least a shimmer of clarity in what in fact it is that
is happening as we continue the search, the open ended investigations. So
this looks like a choice but should it really be one? Can't we allow a
transcendent interpretation after-the-fact? I would try and include in the
openness an openness to whatever people wish to make of it, you 'll say this
doesn't solve the problem in any way but it is not a matter of answer but of
the right questions, perhaps. Also as might be more clear later it is very
well possible that the attitude is advisable for strategic reasons, if there
could be an agreement on openness as a general strategic aim. 

It's here by the way that any reference to negative theology is best placed,
or so I presume, because the lack of aim inevitably drives us to a
mystification of Absence, Being under erasure and what have you. It is our
barrier against the Abyss of the Real that is being constructed there, it is
inevitably human to finally assert its thing-ness, while of course in our
'right' mind we might only claim its being-thought. In some ways it is the
cradle of poetic energy as it is happening, over and over again, but now we
are already way into literary dominions where perhaps most of you wouldn't
want to proceed in this context.

So what I'm proposing here is taking the ethical considerations as a
starting point to fuel the drive that might get the matter out of its jam.

Now, procedurally, for all I know, and I haven't got a clue about that,
honestly,  any dichotomy pointing to an either/or situation, doors to choose
from, can also be constructed as an energizing point to generate a potential
opening that literally undoes the earlier dichotomy, or even dilemma. This
one in particular may only be pointing  us further to a place where at this
moment our clarity is insufficient: causality and from there onward the
matter of free will and determinism.

You see what happens in a recursive solution, or procedure if you want is
that the need for any definition is postponed by the point of view that is
shifting as the procedure advances, until a basic condition is met and the
recursive procedure runs out. I think Manuel DeLanda suggested something
like that in his recent work, I'm not sure though (Intensive Science and
Virtual Philosophy, ISBN- 0-8264-7932-40 - I read it but I read very
intensely and then I utterly forget what I have read, it's some crazy poet's
thing, no doubt.) I do remember I didn't altogether agree with the swiftness
of some of his conclusions, that seemed to introduce a new kind of
reductionism, but I may have misread it altogether.

Now recursive proceedings being what they are they tend to run out pretty
quickly if you place the instance of recurrence too early, or simply at the
wrong place. 

You can't have a reality like we 'know' conceived so that it will  have
computers in it to model a reality after that reality hoping for the modeled
reality to have any other than a draining effect on the primal reality at
hand for instance. Sure, the Second Life may be 'real' on its own ground and
it is, but the energy spiral is inward and nothing comes out, its garbage is
only humans with big starry eyes and a give me more Matrix wish.

Now with DNA the structure of causality and pseudo-causalities is perhaps
such that the coding process is using the garbage it creates in a
fertilizing disintegration that creates as a side-effect consistencies
within the pool of potential that heighten the possibility of 'more'
evolution to occur, the more being as yet 'unsigned' as to the direction it
takes. 

You see taking the heat of the definition of what is coding what might yield
more of a potential in grasping the essence that is required for more
understanding.

But sure,  I haven't got the slightest clue what this all  might mean for
this problem because I simply lack the knowledge of bio-technicalities or
even the basic understanding of DNA, but from what I get from this
discussion, and some of my readings this or a similar warp into movement
itself may be a way out of at least the speech  obstruction concerning the
codeness of DNA code.

So the great beyond required here might simply be the one of momentarily
stressing process over a fictional and fixating object combined with a full
awareness that the human mind requires the object to communicate whatever it
needs to communicate in order to keep the living process of its creative
inquiry going.


Dirk Vekemans, poet
& author of Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
@ www.vilt.net/nkdee


-----Original Message-----
From: empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Eugene Thacker
Sent: zaterdag 6 oktober 2007 18:32
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Re: Poetics of DNA II

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

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