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

["dean wilson" <deanwilson9@gmail.com>]

Observing this thread and hoping it doesn't go away soon I can really
appreciate the many directions Judith's ideas have taken the posts.
Sadly, I won't be able to get her book for a while since I'm in
Vietnam. Oh, I'm sorry, that would be an obsolete empirical
hypothesis, forgive me. In terms of the discussion process and the
topic at hand, however, Eugene is clearly the heaviest of the hitters
for my dosh, and I think that's because he seems ironically less
inclined to the resistance literature mode, which is not an easy thing
to do with this topic, it's so rife with quandaries. Did you notice
how I just avoided some untenable euphemisms? With all the talk of
Aristotle and the like, though, why not take up the cover of Judith's
book on its face value. If the straw men were put to rest for a while
and the unmusical manipulative functions of acronym usage were the
subject of discussion, I would say that the book and the analysis of
the book, along with reflections on the sorry lot of beings subjected
to extravagant alterations of life on earth without their informed
consent fall under the category of Rhetoric. But who am I to suppose
that a difference between the poetic arts and the persuasive arts
might be interesting when thinking about scientific instruments? What
is a particle accelerator if not a song and dance? I would be most
grateful for a brief explanation of this word choice. Since along with
empiricism, humanism, habeas corpus, hypothesis, ideology, and pretty
much the kitchen sink, homonyms and synonyms are also toast, why not
just call the book "The toe cheese of everything you cherished about
guns?" I get the feeling that what is being resisted is a
consciousness that names things, but when it tries to name itself it
devolves into a kind of tabula rasa or what Eugene might call
noumenon. Dean


On 10/10/07, Eugene Thacker <eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> Well, what I had in mind w/ the idealism-empiricism reference was the way that
> the concept of a genetic code seems to suture together two different, though not
> incommensurate, ideas:
>
> - On the one hand, the discourse of information seems to imply immaterial form.
> I think this is demonstrable historically (e.g. Crick et al.'s appropriation of
> 'information' from Shannon's information theory definition), but I think it
> still, even today, pervades colloquial language about code.
> - On the other hand, what is being talked about is not just abstract code, but
> the notion of a biological-material entity *as a code in itself*. Yes, there are
> instances in which DNA is 'represented' as code (for instance, the genome as a
> string of bits in a database), but this itself is made possible by what I would
> argue is actually a non-representational concept of a genetic code. Or, at
> least, there's a great deal of fuzziness in the 1950s/60s when 'the coding
> problem' was being sorted out. Protein codes are a good example, since it is
> their hypercomplex surface structure that enables them to 'stick.'
>
> So in a certain sense - and I think this is a bit reductive, but oh well... -
> the concept of a genetic code raises the old split between form and matter. If
> DNA is the wet, gooey, 'stuff of life' then how can it be a dry, abstract,
> immaterial number? On the one hand there is the code as a string of units (A, T,
> C, G...), but the sequence and seriality of this code is indelibly linked to
> material and physical processes in the cell (replication of DNA, transcription/
> translation of RNA, cellular metabolism). Jacob points this out in 'The Logic of
> Life.' DNA is quite Aristotelian. What the life principle or 'psukhe' as form is
> for Aristotle, DNA as in-form-ation is for molecular biology. The hylomorphism
> of the genetic code is less about what the code 'says' than what it does.
>
> Now, there are, of course, plenty of counter-discourses which resist the notion
> of information-as-immaterial (e.g. media ecology, phenomenology-based media
> studies, 'the materiality of the medium'). But when we talk about the genetic
> code, to me the specificity of this is different from generally talking about
> 'bodies in code' or any cyber-stuff... If one wanted to think about an
> informatic materialism, or a physical code, this seems like an interesting area
> in which to look. A researcher can look up a particular DNA sequence via an
> online database. Using an oligonucleotide synthesizer, that person can
> materialize that sequence in a test tube. That same sequence can then be
> inserted into a bacterium (a plasmid  'library') for further research.
> Hypothetically the reverse direction is possible too (e.g. the process of
> extracting code). So there's the 'code' as a string of bits that appears to
> exist across material substrates (database, test tube, organism). But, of
> course, it isn't the same in each instance, for each of the media - or biomedia
> - bring with them different sets of constraints (e.g. data mining in the
> database, PCR for the test tube DNA, genetic recombination or mutation in the
> bacterium). It's this 'same/not-same' ambiguity that's interesting to me, and I
> think it's also related, even if distantly, to the Aristotelian problem of form/
> matter. And it gets even more complicated with emerging fields like DNA
> computing....
>
> -Eugene
>
>
>
>
>
> Quoting "sdv@krokodile.co.uk" <sdv@krokodile.co.uk>:
>
>  eugene,
>
>  Could you explain why the concept of DNA-as-code forecloses idealism or
>  empiricism ? It  may be that you are assuming that the following
>  sentences referring to the noetic and the noumenal are precisely why you
>  believe this... but still I would like to be sure that these comments
>  preceded as they are by DNA-as-code threatening to liquidate the thing
>  itself, are more explainable.
>
>
>  >
>  > 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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