Re: [-empyre-] Re: Ontological equality

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

That biopoiesis is the Code's evolved protocol, and
that Craig Venter's (and other biotech gurus)
particularly anthropic poiesis mimetically doubles,
simulates and virtualizes such illustrates the
wonderfully and terribly bizarre state of this
concept, DNA poetics...

In a sense, we might speak of a potential terrorism
involved in such a hijacking of the Code, no?  

Or perhaps, it's all for the better...? Biotech firms
think so...and many patients that use their products,
too...

No longer is it a matter of 'imagining' some degree of
Code control...authorial power rests in our
biosubstance now: is our politics ready? 

Nick

--- Eugene Thacker <eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu>
wrote:

> Instead of intervening in or manipulating nature,
> would the mastery of mastery
> be something like the creation of new laws of nature
> (perhaps Venter would like
> to see himself in this guise...)? Does this also
> describe somewhat paradoxical
> attempts to instrumentalize self-organization,
> emergence, and complexity?
> 
> The title of Brian's post - 'ontological equality' -
> actually gets at the
> problem quite directly. The absolute assertion of
> equality leads one to forms of
> pantheism or mysticism...or, from the all-too-human
> vantage point, nihilism. But
> then even the counter-assertion of 'difference'
> still requires some notion of
> the common, or that within which difference differs.
> For some, Deleuze's
> assertion of difference-in-itself simply reverts
> back to pantheism/univocity/
> immanence.
> 
> Perhaps this is why Badiou begins from nothing, or
> the void. All of the
> discussion on being and ethics presumes a notion of
> being-as-generosity,
> positivity, presentation. But even Badiou will still
> assert an efficacy of the
> subject (though radically retooled via set theory)
> with the notions of fidelity,
> situation/event, and the generic. (I apologize for
> my shoddy reading of Badiou,
> but at times I feel the lefty-May'68 subject
> furtively enters his discussion...)
> 
> What if, in addition to the problem of ontological
> equality, then opens onto
> another problem, which is that of causality
> (ontological action)? Or maybe the
> relation between equality and causality is itself
> the issue - that is, the
> concept of 'relation' itself?...
> 
> But maybe this is a way to bring things back to
> Judith's notion of a poetics of
> DNA. I take 'poiesis' here to be nonhuman, but not
> in the Latourian sense.
> Poiesis has, at least since Aristotle, been about
> affectivity (pathos), and
> there is no affectivity without circulation and
> relation.
> 
> -Eugene
>