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

Actually that was the original title--how did you know?

But more to the point.  Two things:

First, DNA as it exists as a cultural object, is a code only in so far as it operates as a displaced site for other signifiers. Whatever the signifier DNA refers to, it is not whatever processes scramble on the level of the molecular. So any time one wants to dub DNA a code, no matter how that signifier is defined, it still drags in all the other baggage. In so far as any signifier would do this, the impasse is how to use language, since the ideology-free is, I would submit, impossible. But so what?

Second, I am intrigued by the shift (which occurs systematically in many academic sites) from discussions of representation as if that practice is somehow not material, immaterial, idealistic, or some other frou frou thing into the ballsy, gutsy environment of "Ethics," an equally ideological realm whose delusory occupation at the top of the intellectual food chain (at least in current practice) represents in some ways the driving need to make such conversations useful in an ideology that understands material as those things which may have material effects on the world. Are we really talking about ethics? because if we were, the first question would be the should's and should nots of representing at all, which if answered in the negative would forestall the rest of ethical conversations before they started. My question is what the connection is between representation which must be misunderstood, discarded, and minimalized on a regular basis and the drive towards making policy, considering policy, deciding what is right and wrong. It is as if this ethical imperative wants to secure the slippery unstableness of the still-platonic fakery of the word through some gesture of philosophy.

Ah--and the cover whose discourse, is, as is always the case with publishers--marketing, marketing, marketing. I wanted my name to go on top of the monkey.

Judith
On Oct 17, 2007, at 9:14 AM, dean wilson wrote:

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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