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