[-empyre-] a book, dna and code

["sdv@krokodile.co.uk" <sdv@krokodile.co.uk>]

In the news today a story of GM poplar trees which has had 'rabbit 
genes' added to them have been created and which for some strange reason 
scientists and publicists wilfully misinform the idiot journalist with 
the phrase 'rabbit gene'. It was curious how appropriate this was as a 
copy of The Poetics of DNA arrived today, one primary theme is precisely 
this. For myself this is a line of thought I've been interested in ever 
since geneticists /scientists began to publish scientific papers aimed 
to prove that their cultural and personal prejudices are founded on 
scientific truths. I was thinking in terms of referring to the scientist 
who invented the gay gene, but by chance over the weekend I was 
listening to a tape of James Watson who has made a living out of 
translating DNA into exchange value (without any use-value at all) and 
who is constantly upset when his completely irrational suppositions are 
rejected by rational fools like Price Charles who seem to understand how 
irrational and criminally dangerous people like Watson are.(p67 for a 
lovely quote).

It's always a curious process reading a text which is focused by design 
on a central metaphor, DNA in this case, that has to function for the 
reader as the text defines it. But if it doesn't as it cannot for me ? 
The argument begins with a question: "What has DNA become that we see it 
as a cosmic truth, representative of all answers, potential for all 
cures, repositary for all identities, end of all stories ?" (p2) (I 
discover after typing this sentence that it's quoted as a blurb on the 
rear cover). A question that shouldn't be rhetorical but which is 
because the phrasing displays a barely concealed forced-choice, which 
can be nothing but negative. Because after all the word 'all' is simply 
nonsensical in this context, another simple appeal to faith.

Perhaps there is a counter-question after all: whether a reader who 
regards the idea of DNA containing any truth at all as particularly 
infantile, will find the discussion of DNA as metaphor useful, since DNA 
is unrecognizable. Is there a moment in the text when the ideologies are 
 stripped away and DNA is not treated as metaphoric ? Of course it is 
said explicitly (as Judith Root repeated here) 'no figuration of DNA or 
genes is free from somekind of additional, if subtle, cultural idea....' 
   Always already ideological as we might say --- but what is then 
offered immediately afterwards is an alternative more scientific 
proposition than the previously mentioned 'cultural idea' (15). What is 
being proposed is not just a better ideology but something closer to a 
naturalism or a realism ? Given the rejection of empiricism a 
constructivism seems  out of the question.

Shortly after this "At issue in all of this is not the 'truth'-value of 
DNA or the fine complexities of molecular biology but how scientific 
artifacts such as DNA function simultanously as cultural icons and 
ideological work..." (16) Actually I think this may well be wrong for we 
should precisely be saying that it is the truth-value that is denied 
when science is blatently ideological work.

best...


steve