[-empyre-] Re: Ontological equality

[Ryan Griffis <ryan.griffis@gmail.com>]

> And the goal is not the same as eugenics, which is ideologically  
> distinct and primarily existed in an earlier social and economic  
> cycle – the main difference being that the ideologies that formed  
> eugenics are pre-spectacle, pre-mass-consumption.

i'm going to continue a conversation with Steve offlist regarding  
some of the problems of guilt, responsibility and capital - if he'll  
continue to indulge me :)
But the question of eugenics is related to some of the other  
conversations going on here, so i'd like to follow that up.
i'm not convince of Steve's quick dismissal of eugenics as  
"ideologically distinct" and existing in an "earlier social and  
economic cycle."
CAE's notion of a "second wave" of eugenics - one based on spectacle  
and consumption in a hyper-competitive, individualized economic  
context - was based on some of Osborn's own understanding that the  
earlier eugenics program, based on pre-free market ideologies was  
bound to fail.
http://yougenics.net/home.php?page=eugenicsCAE
And aside from that, i think it's too convenient to assume that  
because the dominant ideology is one of hyper free market  
competition, that other (seemingly) competing and contradictory  
ideologies aren't operating at the same time. Was the US state's use  
of Norplant in the 90s pre-spectacle/mass-consumption? Or is that  
just not considered enough of an instance of negative eugenics?
On other thoughts...
There is an issue of scale going on here that i think is not mutually  
exclusive or merely incongruous. Eugene asks early on in The Global  
Genome how biological exchange can be considered more specifically  
than the kinds of exchanges that have gone on for ages, without  
becoming ahistorical.  The scale he locates is globalization (via  
Sassen and others) - but it's a globalization that vacillates between  
place AND space. And that space is informatic and political as well  
as the place is geographic and biological (Foucault's biopolitics +  
Marx's "species being") - at least that's how i remember it.
The student Judith described earlier represents another issue of  
scale, and the functioning of the symbolic matter of DNA in removing  
the political from the informatic - in some very "established" ways.
i'm reminded of Alan Sekula's depictions of the slow mechanisms of  
global trade - how all that speed of information exchange is  
buttressed by city sized ships and ports. the economy may have  
changed, but the role of ports (and the space/place of the sea)  
remains central to our current form of globalization - and it's still  
a globalization of asymmetrical power and benefits enforced by  
violence even in the face of competing realities.
i'm wondering how or if a similar reading of biological exchange  
might be interesting. If synthetic biology is an exchange of novel  
aesthetics and economics, what is coming along with it that could be  
read in the very material it moves through?
i also wonder if that question makes any sense :)
best,
ryan